The Tourist: Critic Reviews

You go into a movie like The Tourist hoping for a feast of personality from the stars. What you get, in this case, is a waxworks version of chemistry.

When she [Angelina Jolie] first appears in a come-hither outfit and a small private smile, she looks ready for liftoff. She never ignites, and neither does the movie.

Unfortunately, the funny side of the film is abandoned quickly, and the muddled plot disappears bubblingly into the lagoon.

It may be the only movie ever to feature a bad performance by Johnny Depp, one of the best actors working in films. Who knew he could be wooden and unconvincing in a role?

The high wattage of stars Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie cast the film in a spotlight that would be unflattering for most movies, least of all an insubstantial, tension-free thriller like this.

The good news is that Jolie and Depp accessorize nicely together. He rarely gets to spar with women in his weight class, and his slovenly approach to stardom might be the antidote for Jolie's solemnity.

Jolie is gorgeous, but photographed in reverent profile, like a Roman coin. Depp is amusingly droll, but it turns out that "mild" for this great actor looks a lot like "sleepy."

This woefully botched mystery-adventure-thriller-caper-romance-comedy, or whatever it was meant to be, is no fun at all.

The Tourist merely asks you to sit back and enjoy the ride, and then makes that task a breeze.

... it's a bit of a shock to see this caliber of star power and big-budget production and location juice... yield such dismal results.

The plot is preposterous. So what you need is a movie that floats with bemusement above the cockamamie, and actors who tease each other.

"The Tourist" is a facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen's 1963 picture.

Unfortunately, this is one of those movies with a twist ending that turns a character inside out, revealing earlier scenes to be essentially fraudulent and more or less invalidating one's emotional investment in the story.

Think about adding To Catch a Thief or Charade to your Netflix queue instead.

Enduring "The Tourist" is like going for a ride in a sinking gondola.

Jolie! Depp! Romantic locations! Intrigue! Some movies sound too good to be true. The Tourist is one of them.

Star power can cover up a multitude of shortcomings in a film. Turns out stupidity isn't one of them.

Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Venice -- what more could you want from a movie? Quite a lot, actually.

Von Donnersmarck, who brilliantly depicted government surveillance in East Berlin before the fall of the wall in his earlier German film, astonishingly can't even find a way to make Interpol's spying interesting here.

The script piles the preposterous on top of the absurd and the film's thin charms dissipate, revealing the creaking movie star contraption underneath.

As a thriller, The Tourist makes a good travelogue.

To battle the logic of the film would be to swat flies in a hurricane.

What should have sizzled fizzles.

As for Depp, his character makes so little sense that he can hardly be blamed for blinking his way through the movie with an expression of blank-faced puzzlement that recalls Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate.

This zero-chemistry pairing of Angelina Jolie and Depp stands as an object lesson in the perils of succumbing to the siren call of big-time Hollywood filmmaking for a foreign director with one art house hit behind him.