Jolie plays Elise, the lover of master criminal, Alexander Pierce, who embezzles a big fortune and gets clear away, leaving Scotland Yard, Interpol and some Russian thugs in search of him. Now their last hope pins on Elise, who they think may reveal the trace of the convict on the lam.
Well aware of the situation and her being watched, Elise takes on a bullet train from Paris to Venice and meets Frank (played by Depp) by chance onboard, a math teacher, who is a nerdy and humble tourist, and as she plots, makes the chasers believe that Frank is the man wanted.
Even though Frank later realizes the trick and finds himself in this deadly game, the decoy falls in love with Elise. But the love affair just occurs in a flash well before people could detect their growing affection . Therefore, the zero-chemistry pairing makes the movie quite awkward and implausible.
"The Tourist" not only suffers a severe absence of emotional engagement, but ignores the pace and urgency of story development. The moment you begin to expect for an exciting chase, a subplot inserts and breaks down the build-up. Nevertheless, "The Tourist" lives up to its name since it provides some good scenes, although you must suffer through watching a couple without any discernible onscreen chemistry.
After receiving a foreign-language film Oscar for his 2006 art house drama, "The Lives of Others," German film director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, makes a bold attempt in "The Tourist" to produce a Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately, the tension-free thriller completely reveals his ineptitude in the genre.
On my 1-to-10 movie scale, I give the movie a FOUR.
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