The Tourist

What happens when you pair up 2 big box office draws, Johnny Depp and Angeline Jolie, on the big screen, toss in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarch, the director who directed "The Lives of Others" (a Best Oscar winner for Foreign Film in 2006), and include a European backdrop?  Well, it might have been a winning effort, except "The Tourist" is on slow simmer for all of its running time, and never ever hinted at reaching a boiling point.  It's simply an unmitigated bore of a film.

The characters exists to prop up the premise that Elise (Jolie's character) is being followed by Scotland Yard's finest (Paul Bettany, and Timothy Dalton plays his superior) in an effort to track down an international criminal, Alexander Pierce, in order to recover a hefty sum of stolen funds.  Elise's lover is the thief in question, and she is summoned by Pierce, and tasked with throwing the scent off of law enforcement by boarding a train and picking a random stranger to play the part of Pierce as a precursor for a long awaited reunion.  That random stranger is Frank, played by Johnny Depp.  Throw in a European mobster and his crew also on the look out for Pierce to recover money stolen from them as well, the film tries to produce some tension for Pierce's welfare by having 2 sets of pursuers after him.

von Donnersmarck is more interested in lighting up Jolie for the big screen, rather than creating interesting and entertaining characters for this story, so Jolie looks great, but has little to do, and can't really sustain much interest for her character's predicament.  Johnny Depp also is given little to do, and the whole film just ends up being a harmless, boring movie that feels like 2 big stars hanging out and making a film throttled down in 2nd gear for most of it while on vacation in Venice and other European locales, but never really doing much to elevate an uninspiring story, and their phoned-in performances stall the film's energy level.  Couple that with boring camera work from the director, the film is a wasted casting opportunity.

I give it 1.75 stars, or a grade of C-.