Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie star in The Tourist, a movie that makes audiences wait for something that never happens.
Artwork courtesy of Google Images
The Tourist is an interesting movie, at best. It has elements of a basic movie, but none of them are very good. This is a film that is all too easy to lambaste.
The movie looked good, but the story was unnecessarily complex. The audience sees that Elise (Angelina Jolie, SALT) is living in Paris and under constant surveillance in order for the watchers to capture the man she loves, who stole a large sum of money from some gangster and went into hiding. Elise evades her observers to meet a stranger on the train to Venice, a man by the name of Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp, Alice in Wonderland) and uses him as a decoy husband. Frank’s a math teacher from Wisconsin who was naturally surprised to have a beautiful woman join him in a train. His mannerisms show that he’s just an average guy, and at least that was relatable. The dialogue between the two in their first scene felt like it had a spark of romance; however, that is soon forgotten. The closest these two get is-literally-in Frank’s dreams. So far, we can throw the “falling madly in love” setup out of this movie, and the rest of their “romance” feels like he’s following her just to see what she does next like a lonely lost puppy. The outfits of the characters suit them: The gangster wears suits, Frank wears a collared shirt and a jacket, and Elise is very well dressed and looks like a rich woman touring Europe would.
The spy part of this movie isn’t very impressive, either. The thief is tracked by Scotland Yard, and poorly, I might add. They end up calling off the report of Frank as the thief and then someone within the office alerts the mobsters that Frank is the thief. The odds of a Scotland Yard employee with ties to the mob are slim, and this plot device was plainly ridiculous. The actors who played the intelligence in the movie weren’t very memorable. There’s a chance there were some big names in the cast, but they didn’t play their parts with enough screen presence.
The Tourist is based on a 2005 French film that was nominated for “Best First Work” by France’s César Awards, but I highly doubt this incarnation will receive any accolades. If they had screened the original version for a few weeks with subtitles or English dubbed audio, they might have done better than rewriting the film for an American audience and familiar actors and actresses. Oddly, Johnny Depp played his part very well. I had the notion that this is a rare movie where Depp plays a normal man, not looking for any kind of trouble or leaping around a pirate ship.
I wasn’t impressed by the movie, other than its locations. Shot in Paris, France and Venice, Italy, the atmosphere was right. The scene where Frank jumped out of a window and ran across old ceramic-shingled rooftops was a prime example of correct location. I don’t want to spoil it, but at the end The Tourist left me feeling incomplete, and my first reaction was surprise at why a movie would pull an ace out of its sleeve on a whim. They spent two hours of film reinforcing something that was already accepted from the beginning, and in the last three minutes of the movie they revealed it was all a lie and turned everything it told you on its head. It builds up to a tense moment that never happens.
I wouldn’t see The Tourist, as the plot is so weak it couldn’t fight its way out of a wet paper bag regardless of its surprise ending. Angelina Jolie played her role as the femme fatale perfectly, and the scenery was nice.
★★☆☆☆
