Decoy

Sam Worthington is a one savvy/lucky/clever sunovagun.

The blockbusting Aussie – who’s made his name starring in hits such as Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and Clash of the Titans – was supposed to star in The Tourist, y’ see, opposite Charlize Theron, but due to those pesky (or, in this case, fortuitous) “creative differences” that sometimes plague big Hollywood projects such as this one, he was replaced with Johnny Depp, and, thus, he was able to escape a fate of co-carrying this dud on his strong, franchise-friendly shoulders.

Not that the movie is a complete bore...after all, it was helmed with an elegant, but too-patient hand by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the director of the acclaimed The Lives of Others, and it is up for three Golden Globes.

Ha! That last bit was meant completely tongue in cheek.

By now you’ve either seen this last-December release or you haven’t and you won’t, so I’ll be brief: The Tourist, like The American before it, is much too European and quiet to have found an audience it stateside (you have to be one or the other, never both, and ideally neither...like was the with the first Mission: Impossible), and the fact that Jolie and Depp have the chemistry of a pair of alluring and beautiful but mismatched shoes doesn’t help.

The story is as follows, though, in case you’re like me and you find yourself having some free time on a lazy afternoon.

Jolie plays Elise, an impeccably dressed-although-perennially-way-too-made-up Brit who hops on a 8:22 a.m. train from Paris to Italy on the instruction of the mysterious Alexander Pearce, a wanted-by-Scotland Yard tax evader who’s also in the sights of a mobster from whom he’s stolen a whole lotta money.

On board, she meets Frank (Depp), and American math teacher of little consequence in Europe on a mend-a-broken-heart journey. The two flirt...she teaches him a thing or two about how a woman like her should be treated...he likes it. Except he’s a mark; she has an agenda, and that is to make the men who are after her (including Paul Bettany) think he is, in fact, the elusive Alexander Pearce.

The Tourist takes them to Venice, where their attraction quickly evolves into a whirlwind romance that thrusts them into a slooow and deadly game of cat and mouse, especially for bumbling Frank, who must figure out what’s up along the way – while fending for himself after she moves on and leaves him behind.

This throwback of a movie would work infinitely better if it had some genuine thrills going for it, some excitement, but it doesn’t. The climactic twist is a doozy, I’ll give it that much, but it comes at too high a price, which is seeing two of the world’s biggest superstars of today together on screen for the very first time only to fail to hold our interest. It’s a disappointing trip that I wish I’d left to try to enjoy in the comfort of my own home.

My Rating **

Photo: Sony Pictures.