The Tourist opens on a train to Venice, and for a while the film believes it is a romance. Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) is a mathematics teacher from a community college in Wisconsin. Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) is a British woman who picks him out of the carriage on purpose. She is supposed to. Alexander Pearce, her lover, left her written instructions at a Parisian café: board the train, choose a man, and let the police believe he is Pearce. She burns the note. She boards. Frank has no idea he has been cast in someone else’s crime.
“It all started when he met a woman.”
That tagline is the honest part of the marketing. The Tourist is a 2010 American romantic thriller directed and co-written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, and it is a remake of the 2005 French film Anthony Zimmer. GK Films financed and produced it. Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions released it in most countries through Columbia Pictures. The budget was $100 million. It grossed $278.8 million worldwide. The film runs 103 minutes and carries three genres on its label: action, thriller, romance. It does not commit to any of them.
Trailer, via Volta Pictures.
Inspector Acheson and the £744 Million
The plot runs on two men hunting the same ghost. Inspector John Acheson (Paul Bettany) has spent years chasing Pearce, who owes £744 million in back taxes and is believed to have used plastic surgery to change his face. Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff) is a mobster Pearce stole $2.3 billion from. Acheson works with French police and Scotland Yard, following Elise through downtown Paris. A policeman on Shaw’s payroll tips him off that Pearce is on the train to Venice with Elise. Shaw goes to Venice.
Elise takes Frank to the Hotel Danieli. She gets instructions from Pearce to attend a ball. Then she abandons Frank, and Shaw’s men chase him. The Italian police detain him. A corrupt inspector tries to hand him to Shaw’s men for a bounty. Elise pulls him out just before the trade, and the escape becomes an extended boat chase. She leaves him at the airport with his passport and money and tells him to go home. Then she goes to Acheson, who has come to Venice, and the film reveals she is an undercover Scotland Yard agent, suspended for suspected sympathies with Pearce.
Johnny Depp Is the Problem
Frank is the audience’s way in, and Depp plays him as a man waiting for someone to tell him what the scene is. That is a choice, and it is the wrong one. A mathematics teacher from a community college in Wisconsin should be the one grounded thing in a film built on a ruse, the person whose confusion a viewer can hold onto. Instead he is vague, soft, and uncurious. When Shaw’s men come for him, there is no contrast between the man and the danger, because the man was never quite there.
Jolie has the easier job. Elise is a woman executing a plan she did not write, and Jolie plays the composure without much underneath it. The Hotel Danieli looks right. The train looks right. The boat chase moves. What is missing is any sense that these two people want anything from each other beyond the next scene.
Timothy Dalton and a Ball in Venice
The supporting cast is a list of good actors given little to do. Timothy Dalton is Chief Inspector Jones. Paul Bettany is Acheson, and he is the closest thing to a spine in the film — a man who has spent years on one target and cannot afford to be wrong. Rufus Sewell is credited only as The Englishman. Steven Berkoff plays Shaw as pure threat, which is all the script asks. Christian De Sica, Alessio Boni, Daniele Pecci, Giovanni Guidelli, Raoul Bova and Bruno Wolkowitch fill out the Italian and French ranks.
The Golden Globes nominated The Tourist three times, and the nominations started an argument about whether the film was a comedy or a drama. Henckel von Donnersmarck said repeatedly it was neither. He called it “a travel romance with thriller elements,” and said that if he had to choose between the two, he would choose comedy. That is a director telling you the film has no genre to stand on. It is also, unintentionally, the most accurate review the movie got that year.
What the $278.8 Million Actually Says
The box office is the interesting number here. A $100 million film that grosses $278.8 million worldwide is a success on paper, and The Tourist was one. It also scored 37 out of 100 on Metacritic, and critics received it negatively. Those two facts sit next to each other without contradicting: a film can sell tickets on two famous faces and a Venice backdrop and still be a bad film. The gross measures the pull of the cast. It does not measure whether anyone enjoyed the ride.
The three Golden Globe nominations deserve the same skepticism. Awards bodies nominate campaigns and names as much as they nominate work, and the comedy-or-drama debate was a symptom, not a mystery. A film that cannot say what it is cannot be judged as one thing, which is exactly the cover a weak movie needs.
The Tourist Is a Postcard With a Chase Scene
The Tourist is a remake that kept the premise of Anthony Zimmer and lost its nerve. The premise is good: a woman picks a stranger on a train and makes the police and a mobster believe he is the man they want. That is a thriller. The film keeps stopping to be a romance, and the romance has no heat, because Frank never becomes a person and Elise never becomes anything but a plan. Henckel von Donnersmarck’s own description is the fairest one available. A travel romance with thriller elements is a postcard with a chase scene stapled to it.
The boat chase is fine. The Hotel Danieli is fine. Depp and Jolie on a train to Venice is a poster, not a movie. What the film needed was one real scene where Frank understands what he has walked into and decides to stay anyway. It never writes that scene, so the ending — Elise revealed as an undercover agent, Frank left at the airport with his passport and money — lands as a shrug. Nobody in The Tourist ever chooses anything. They are all following instructions.
Key facts
– Release: 2010
– Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
– Runtime: 103 minutes
– Budget: $100 million
– Worldwide gross: $278.8 million
– Metacritic: 37/100
– Score: 3.7 of 10
– Golden Globe nominations: 3
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