Duplicity

Review By: Jon Allen
JonAllen@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: C+

Duplicity aims for subversive filmmaking, while honoring old-school charm via its globe-hopping, espionage plot. What emerges however, after a promising beginning, something less satisfying takes hold, and what we’re mostly left with is a busy, cluttered, globe-hopping mess.

Ex-CIA officer Claire (Julia Roberts) and Ex-M16 agent Ray (Clive Owen) learn of a plot to launch a secret product that will revolutionize the industry, and want the rewards that will come with stealing the product away from its makers. I won’t divulge the industry in question, but can give you a hint: Bald men everywhere will rejoice.

Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson-what are you doing here?) is the corporate head who announces this product, but he is met head on by rival Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti), who has his own plans to find the information necessary to make this product his own. Of course, Ray and Claire, with their professional and romantic history, are more determined than anyone to steal the information necessary to reap the financial rewards from this invention, and they work together in a series of tightly compacted, stylish threads, hoping to rip off both companies and seek their financial heaven, which in turn, will grant them an early retirement and an opportunity to match the film’s stylish cinematography with their own brand of world-travel.

Will their plan succeed? You’ll have to watch. Duplicity is worth seeing, but you leave feeling a little empty. That’s because the corporate espionage plot and highly-stylized, busy camera work and cinematography take center stage, and after a while, it is readily apparent that these aren’t plot devices: they are coating for the eye-candy.

And we care less and less about the corporate takeover, because Duplicity tries too hard to withhold the information necessary for us to find something to hold on to. With its rapid pacing and two hour running time, an audience should find the means to witness interesting and exploratory plot threads that would make the movie more than it amounts to. Instead, with its constant back-tracking-Duplicity begins in Dubai, then shifts to New York five years later, than back-pedals to Rome “two years ago”, we never really move forward.

If Owens and Roberts had more succinct on-screen chemistry or personality, we might be more inclined to follow their mostly tepid love-affair around the world, but like the locales, their affection really doesn’t amount to more than sly, off-handed, cynicism masquerading as witty romanticism. As for the locales, they seem tacked on and not all that revelatory. Rome looks like it could have been filmed in L.A., while London looks like it could have been filmed in Chicago. A globe-happy feel- rich with textural scenery and a tangential geography- would give the love affair a semblance of emotional weight or sexual tension. Duplicity starts off promising. But it feels like a promise, a binding contract to be both curious, funny, charming, witty – Roberts and Owens share a common goal to reap the ...