Star power can’t save ‘The Tourist’

Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp team up for The Tourist, now playing in theaters across the Valley.

By Josh Bell

Friday, Dec. 10, 2010 | 11:46 a.m.

The Details

The Tourist

Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany

Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Rated PG-13

Beyond the Weekly

The Tourist

IMDb: The Tourist

Rotten Tomatoes: The Tourist

There’s a thin line between larger-than-life glamour and lazy self-indulgence when it comes to big Hollywood star vehicles, and The Tourist unfortunately trends mostly toward the latter. Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp glide through Europe in elegant, impeccably chosen outfits, but they both look rather bored, and the movie constructed around them suffers from half-assed writing and direction. In the right hands, it could have been a throwback to classic and classy caper movies like Charade and To Catch a Thief, but instead it’s more along the lines of this past summer’s Knight and Day, a vehicle for mega-stars to reassert their likability.

Depp in particular has spent so much time playing over-the-top oddballs in crazy outfits over the last few years that it’s jarring to see him show up as a normal person—in this case a mild-mannered math professor on vacation in Europe. Depp’s Frank meets Jolie’s Elise, an impossibly poised international spy, on a train, and is soon drawn into her web of espionage and intrigue. Their banter should be lively and witty, but it’s mostly tired, and rarely romantic and sexy. The plotting is pretty rote, right through the requisite twists, and then the final reversal invalidates virtually everything that precedes it, pointing to either poor planning or a lack of interest from generally reliable screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), along with co-writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others).

Until then, the movie skates along harmlessly enough, and while Depp and Jolie don’t have much chemistry, they do look fabulous (as does the scenery), and Jolie brings a bit of a twinkle (plus a credible British accent) to her role as a devious schemer. As is often the case with movies like this, it looks like the stars are having a whole lot more fun than the audience.