Film review: Duplicity

Published on Thursday 19 March 2009 18:30

DUPLICITY (12A) DIRECTED BY: TONY GILROY STARRING: JULIA ROBERTS, CLIVE OWEN, PAUL GIAMATTI, TOM WILKINSON * *

AS THE screenwriter of the Bourne trilogy and the writer/director of the self-consciously downbeat corporate thriller Michael Clayton, you can hardly blame Tony Gilroy for wanting to lighten up a little on the cinematic doom and gloom. With his new film, Duplicity, he does exactly that, taking his favoured tropes – espionage, corporate greed, identity issues – and putting a more comedic spin on them. The result is slick – boy, is it slick – but it's also slack. Shooting for the playful suavity of 1960s crime capers such as Charade and The Thomas Crown Affair, Gilroy doesn't have the temperament for this kind of thing. His stylistic tricks are heavy-handed, his dialogue too forced, and for much of the time Duplicity plays out like one of the Ocean's movies minus Steven Soderbergh's visual panache or the cast's easy-going chemistry.

Instead we have Julia Roberts and Clive Owen riffing on their combative lovers from Closer – though admittedly leaving a good deal less emotional devastation in their wake. They play spies who might be in love, but who might also be using each other to pull off the perfect con, an ambiguity that they readily acknowledge keeps their relationship fresh, even though their honesty about it creates major trust issues.

To start with, it is Roberts who appears to have the upper hand as Gilroy sets the scene with a way-back-when prologue that sees her CIA agent, Claire Stenwick, bed MI6 operative Ray Koval (Owen), relieving him of some Egyptian air-defence codes in the process. Flash forward five years and both are working in the private sector, running counterintelligence for rival pharmaceutical companies. He's still bitter about their first encounter, but when they realise they're not only working the same job, but also for the same team – she's a corporate mole, deep undercover at a company rumoured to be launching a new miracle product; he's just joined the firm buying the secrets that she's stealing – they agree to put aside their differences for the benefit of their highly lucrative jobs. Of course, as you'd expect for a film with such a generic title, Duplicity is also full of generic red herrings designed to throw us off the scent of what's really going on, which is the film's cue to pile on complication after complication.

Initially that makes for frivolous fun as Gilroy winds the clock back and forth over the previous five years to reveal a more intricate relationship between his protagonists than we first suspect. But that sense of sophisticated playfulness doesn't last long and soon enough the glossy veneer begins to slip and the classy screwball comedy thriller Duplicity wants to be reveals itself as a distinctly goofier farce with artistic pretensions.

The first hints of this actually come in a show-offy slow-motion title sequence featuring Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson going at each other on the tarmac of a private airfield. They're the respective CEOs of Equikrom (the company Ray and Claire are really working for) and Burkett & Randle (the one they're attempting to steal from). Both are convinced that the only way to control the global markets is to be the first to launch a new product, which is why both spend vast quantities on industrial espionage (it doesn't matter who develops something, just who gets it out first). Unlike in Michael Clayton, where corporate malfeasance took on a sinister edge, here it's strictly non-threatening, revolving around the kind of white-collar skulduggery in which the only people who get burned are those who feel the need for greed.

Nothing wrong with that, especially in the current climate, it's just unfortunate that the MacGuffin Gilroy has chosen to drive the plot is implausibly silly, even by the standards of genre. Indeed, the moment it's revealed, it's as if the film is embarrassed by its own lameness and starts quietly falling apart, hoping we won't notice.

Particularly specious is the elaborate heist sequence Gilroy has devised to bring the film to some sort of high-stakes climax. Featuring Ray on his mobile guiding Claire around a high-tech office block as she frantically tries to smuggle out some industrial secrets via a bugged photocopying machine before her mole-status is compromised, you do wonder why she doesn't just use her cameraphone to snap a picture of the document and be done with it. The film is full of idiotic moments like that and as it piles on another couple of twists, Gilroy smugly assumes that the surprise ending will be enough to make us ignore the nonsensical plot developments he throws in to facilitate it.

Roberts and Owen don't help matters much. Though they're easy on the eye, they don't generate much heat together, which means it's hard to buy into their relationship, either the risks they take to be together or the air of mistrust that's supposed to supply the film with romantic tension. Roberts comes off worst. She could have used a natural charmer like her Ocean's Eleven co-star George Clooney to bounce off and soften some of her character's more brittle attributes. Owen has to work too hard to be a smooth talker, much like Duplicity has to work too hard to dupe us into believing it's a sophisticated piece of light entertainment. A good con movie should be able to put one over on us, but it shouldn't leave us feeling cheated.