Movie Review: 'The Tourist'

Never before has such blatant lovemaking between a cinematographer and actress taken place right before the audience’s eyes. Verging on obnoxious and exploitive, THE TOURIST is an hour and forty minutes of showcasing Angelina Jolie’s breathtaking beauty… yet unfortunately, not her acting ability, which I can only assume is hidden somewhere underneath all that expertly applied makeup on her face. I’m not even sure if this is her fault for taking the role, the screenwriters’ fault for writing such boring characters, or the director’s fault for directing them as such…but nevertheless, I can almost hear the director in the background shouting for Angelina to lift her face so that her cheekbones perfectly catch the light, while keeping that same private smile on her face for the entire film… even while she’s being shot at. That’s one of the major downfalls THE TOURIST suffers from; the constant calmness of the characters (Depp in particular) makes the already lackluster action that much less interesting. I don’t know about you, but if I’m being constantly shot at, I feel like that would be a good time to become the least bit panicked… especially if you’re just a poor innocent “tourist” (and yes, you will hear that word used an obscene number of times throughout the film).

The role of this innocent American tourist is filled by Johnny Depp, who plays Frank, a man who meets the mysterious Elise while on a train to Venice. What he thinks is a chance encounter soon turns into a situation of mistaken identities, leading Frank and Elise on a run for their lives. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t amused by THE TOURIST. The more the movie progressed, the more ridiculous it became. It was such an experiment in bad filmmaking at times that it was fun to watch, if for no other reason than to laugh at it. Accompanied by an embarrassingly over-melodramatic score that would randomly come on out of nowhere, it seemed like a student filmmaker’s idea of how to rev-up a movie while requiring the actors to do as little acting as possible.

All in All, THE TOURIST is a mediocre addition to the Angelina-Jolie-spy-movie genre, one that somehow manages to take two of the hottest stars out there today, and one of the most beautiful cities in the world, only to produce one of the silliest movies now in theaters.

Rating: C-