Tourist

The most irritating aspect of The Tourist is that it's a remake, obliging a conscientious movie lover to hunt down and compare the original 2005 French thriller, Jerome Salle's Anthony Zimmer, starring Sophie Marceau and Yvan Attal. It shouldn't matter if a remake is a good or bad remake, as it should be judged on its own merit. But, when it's a failure, one wants to find out if the fault is in the design rather than the execution. That's movie-loving conscientiousness: silly, but more satisfying than just slagging off the remake.

First the slags, though. The Golden Globes clique were half-right to nominate The Tourist in their comedy category, since the movie's producers clearly thought they were creating a romantic comedy. Unfortunately, they also created one of the decade's least effective rom-coms, as it is impossible to believe that Angelina Jolie's super-tough Lara Crofty British police secret agent would fall head over heels for Johnny Depp's milk-sop American math teacher. Think of coupling Sophia Loren and Mr Bean, duh.

The plot depends on that dubious premise. Jolie hasn't seen her adored English financier for a year, since he snatched a fortune from a Brit gangster (Steven Berkoff in non-typical muted mode), when he tells her to take a train to Venice and pick up any man who looks like him, to decoy the gangster's Russian henchmen and British police and tax agents chasing him (led by an irritable but not fiery Paul Bettany, under the minimalist supervision of a muted Timothy Dalton). The man she picks is a teacher, a lightly bearded widower from the boondocks, he says, but we, the audience, know that he will be her old love, even though the screenplay tells us he's now four inches shorter and had a multi-million-dollar facial rearrangement. Jolie's character doesn't see or sense the similarity, duh.

Jolie herself knew very well what she was doing when she signed on with the movie's re-maker, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (an already-abbreviated name hereinafter to be called vonD), whose previous and first feature (2006) was a German mega-award-winner he also wrote, The Lives of Others. On the strength of that global BAFTA-winning art-house hit, vonD gained production funds for his first English-language movie. Entering the big time, he apparently play safe by re-making the recent French caper, and Jolie probably saw what a glossy vehicle it had been for Marceau, and asked for it to be re-written with a British context, as she does do a good English accent.

Depp can do many things very well, but it must be supposed that he put himself on heavy-duty muting medication the first day he joined Jolie on a set. VonD appears to have thought he could make a Hitchcockian crime caper, a romantic comedy in the league of Donen's Charade. There is no way that an apprentice director is able to tell Jolie a la Hitchcock that she's just a cow to be given standing markers. She surely ran this movie show, which spends much of its time staring at her (giving her the prima diva air of a Loren or Callas) when it isn't gazing equally lovingly (and even more justifiably) at the beauty of Venice seen from the air or its canals.

For this film (unlike The King's Speech), Julian Fellowes was given, or chose to accept, a co-writer credit, for presumably adding a credible British society detail or two to vonD's rewrite of the Salle original, which was also tweaked by another Oscar winner, Christopher (Usual Suspects) McQuarrie. They are further indicators of why this cinematic trifle had a budget of $100 million; Jolie and Venice get the credit for grossing a quarter of a billion dollars globally. VonD may be happy; Depp will shrug, if he's come off the medication.