The Tourist

This box office flop is terrible if you look at it as a thriller, but not half bad if you look at it as a comedy. Jolie is still hot and Depp is subtly hilarious.

The foreign press was criticized for nominating Depp and Jolie for best comedy performance for this film, saying its a thriller, not a comedy. I think its the US press that got it wrong. This is a really bad thriller but not a bad comedy. The script is very subtle and so are the actors, but its clearly a comedy to anyone who is paying attention. It's just not a very broad comedy (the exception being Depp's scene escaping across the Venice rooftops while Russian hitmen pursue him). Jolie's character is written very much like the mysterious spy from an old Flintstone episode ("I am too important to be captured").

Then there's dialogue like this: Italian policeman: You wish to report a murder.
Frank: Attempted murder.
Italian policeman: That's not so serious.
Frank: Not when you downgrade it from murder. But when you when you upgrade it from room service, it's quite serious.

 There's plenty of stuff like that. If this film had been directed by a good comedy director, it would have been a great hit. Instead they hired the man with a funny name--Florian Heckel von Donnersmarck--instead of a funny guy. Florian is a German who directed the excellent "The Lives of Others" but has no business directing a comedy. Germans are not known for their sense of humor, with the exception of my old "Talk Soup" handler Jeff Zimmer. The marketing people compounded the Florian Heckel Jeckel mistake by then marketing this film as a thriller instead of the very subtle comedy that it is.

That's not to say this is a great comedy, but its certainly a much better comedy than a thriller.  

Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) is traveling alone on a train across Europe when in the best spy novel/caper movie tradition, a beautifully stacked woman sits next to him in the dining car and picks him up. Unbelievable? Happens to be all the time. The woman turns out to be Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) who INTERPOL is watching very closely because she is the girlfriend of a man who stole millions of pounds from a nasty Russian millionaire (Steven Berkoff, the bad guy from a lot of 1980's movies like "Beverly Hills Cop").

She of course is only using him to act as a decoy, trying to fool the police and the Russians into thinking Frank is her fugitive boyfriend in disguise. Frank has no idea what is going on, but plays along. I mean, hey, its Angelina Jolie! They go to Venice, get involved in a lot of unlikely escapes as well as romantic scenes that keep pulling them together until you wonder if she will go with the poor but appealing math teacher or her rich fugitive boyfriend or if everyone will just die at the end.

This film has recieved three Golden Globe nominations: for Best Musical or Comedy; Depp for Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical or Comedy and Jolie's Golden Globes were nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical or Comedy.

In a nice bit of comical casting, former James Bond Timothy Dalton ("License to Kill" and "The Living Daylights") plays a character named Chief Inspector Jones, but is really a thinly disguised version of M, Bond's boss. Makes me think he would be a good replacement for Judy Densch if MGM ever manages to get out of bankruptcy and they make another Bond film again.

The scene where the bad guys break into Depp's hotel room and give chase across the rooftops of Venice. This is the scene where Depp won his Foreign Film nomination for Best Comedy Performance. It was reminiscent of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau or the comic antics of Roberto Begnini. If only the rest of the film had been as broad, American critics might have gotten this is a comedy.

When Angelina Jolie is the star of a film, there really isn't much room for any other hotties. That is definitely true of "The Tourist". Though she is starting to show her age and is a little more made up than she used to be, Jolie still excites with a pensive look or a flash of cleavage. She still has a chance of ripening into the kind of beauty that is Sophia Loren, ageless and classic. We'll see.