Two star vehicle

The Tourist :

Ruwini JAYAWARDANA

It is oblivious that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist worked mainly because of the two big names behind the production rather than a strong storyline. The movie stars two of the biggest crowd-pullers in Hollywood: Angeline Jolie and Johnny Depp, and would have been a sure winner had it not been for the lack of logic and enthusiasm in the tale.

‘The Tourist’ opens to mysterious circumstances. Elise, an English woman who is closely watched by thugs and cops to entrap her embezzler boyfriend, Alexander Pearce, is on her way from Paris to Venice for a reunion. On the way she seduces a stranger on the train and shares an unusual conversation with him over dinner. Dinner and drinks lead to complications like a hail of bullets and boat chasing scenes across the lagoon. Frank Tupelo, an American math teacher, is made to impersonate Pearce to fool the cops but ends up being hunted by vicious gangster Reginald Shaw and his goons.

The movie is also designed in a manner so that it unnecessarily flaunts Angelina Jolie’s looks. From the moment she takes to the street, stuttering around like a model in gorgeous outfits with a smug smile plastered on her face, she reminds us of a haughty princess looking down upon lesser mortals. She practically glows with self-love but despite being a feast for the eyes, this fact does not make her character likable. Elise seems to be more of an immortal than a flesh and blood woman. This is in contrast to the character Jolie played in Salt.

Though you would expect violence to be at the fore in an action thriller, The Tourist wins brownie points for camouflaging this aspect. It is sans bloodshed and even the most tense scenes seem to be interrupted by unexpected comic episodes. One fine example of this is in how the detectives watching the screen realize that the figure clinging to the walls is actually the man whom they had handcuffed behind them!

Aerial shots of Italy heighten the beauty of the background where the action takes place. Yet Von Donnersmarck does not dwell on this feature on the long run. At times it is even underplayed so that you almost wonder why the team wished to shoot a bulk of the movies in Venice but not make ample use of its mystic surroundings.

The chemistry is surprisingly lacking between the star couple and both seem to be a bit uptight with each other. Depp still seems lost in his legendary Captain Jack Sparrow role and resembles just that when he sprints across the rooftops in his pajamas. Though he rarely fails to disappoint, his performance this time round does not come effortlessly as the world’s least likely math teacher. Being a brilliant character actor, the meek and mild portrait of the math teacher does not sit well on him till the twist of events sheds new light on his role.

The plot is clearly influenced by the 2005 French film Anthony Zimmer, in which an ordinary man is drawn into extraordinary circumstances.

Von Donnersmarck seems to have lost out on the opportunity of making a movie of a lifetime with the seductive screen pairing of two of Hollywood’s top names by dallying in clichés and a plot that had been used on screen over and over for more than a decade.