THE TOURIST is a film that tries to hearken back to an earlier era of glossy, romantic thrillers -- the era of Grant, Hepburn, and Hitchcock -- but doesn't quite know how to get there.
Johnny Depp plays Frank, an uninteresting schoolteacher from Wisconsin playing tourist in Europe and trying to recover from a broken heart. While on a train traveling along the French countryside, he encounters a mysterious woman, Elise (Angelina Jolie), who skillfully plays and uses him as a decoy to help her trap a thief. That the thief also happens to be her ex-boyfriend only complicates matters further.
All the trappings are here to make an entertaining thriller out of THE TOURIST: beautiful stars, lush locations and scenery, a convoluted mystery, and an excellent supporting cast, including Timothy Dalton and Paul Bettany, to name a few. Sadly, none of these ingredients can seem to properly gel to make anything that terribly interesting.
Instead, we get an absurd plot that forces its characters to run around like idiots. Okay, fine. That would seem to describe a lot of the thrillers out there. It also has all the clichés one would expect, which would be fine as well, but the director doesn't find any way to make them fresh.
A lack of charming, witty dialogue and mostly bland performances from the two leads only hurt the film more. Despite the number of Oscar-winning writers who worked on the script, it's a sloppy mess of uninspired dialogue. What's especially disappointing, however, is that Depp and Jolie seem to have only the slightest hint of chemistry in their scenes together. Even working with lesser dialogue, one might expect some electricity between them, but there's barely a spark.
This isn't to say there aren't any entertaining bits in the film. While in Venice, Depp goes around unintentionally speaking Spanish instead of Italian, which allows for a few chuckle-worthy exchanges. There's also a scene late in the movie where Depp, affecting an English accent, sounds just like Captain Jack Sparrow. Jolie rolls her eyes and says, "That's a terrible accent." That she says this while sporting an English accent of her own makes it work even better.
Unfortunately, while there are a fair amount of such bright spots peppered throughout, they aren't quite enough. A romantic thriller like this needs ample amounts of style and charm to work properly, and those are two qualities that are sadly lacking in THE TOURIST.
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