‘The Tourist’ an elegant but forgettable film

Chances are your last vacation wasn’t nearly as exciting as Frank Tupelo’s. Being held at gunpoint in a gorgeous Venetian apartment is a normal part of the travels of the main character in “The Tourist.” “The Tourist”

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Steven Berkoff

Directed by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Grade: C+

Chances are your last vacation wasn’t nearly as exciting as Frank Tupelo’s. Being held at gunpoint in a gorgeous Venetian apartment is a normal part of the travels of the main character in “The Tourist.”

The film starts off like a typical espionage movie — a beautiful woman being surveyed by a team of secret agents in Paris. The woman, Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie), is being tracked by the British secret service because of her romantic connection to a subversive white-collar criminal, the mysterious Alexander Pierce. Pierce made off with billions of dollars from the British government and, more importantly, from Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff), the epitome of the evil British businessman.

Elise purposefully boards a train to Venice and attempts to shake off the authorities by spending time with someone that looks like Pierce. That man is Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), a math teacher from Wisconsin who falls in love with Elise at first glance. What follows is a triangle of secrecy between Elise and Frank, the persistent British secret service and the malicious Shaw and his team of Russian bodyguards. It all cumulates at a glamorous ball set against the stunning backdrop of colonial Venetian buildings.

If this movie is anything, it’s classy — unfortunately, classy does not make a movie. “The Tourist” is great on the surface, but it lacks the memorability of a truly good movie. And perhaps — since even bad movies are remembered for being bad — that is one of the worst characteristics for a movie to lack.

This film undeniably includes many pretty things to look at. The scenery is gorgeous, set almost entirely in Venice, and Depp and Jolie are of course very attractive. Indeed, a significant portion  of the movie shows men all over Europe gaping at Jolie, almost to the point of exasperation for the audience.

But at the end of the day, this wasn’t a creative movie. The plot was nothing terribly creative and the ending was contrived and essentially invalidated the rest of the movie.

Many critics argue that Depp and Jolie don’t have chemistry in this film, but it is just a different type of chemistry. Sure, they won’t be immortalized in the stars like Greek lovers of old, but they’re cute in an “eccentric math teacher falls in love with a femme fatale” kind of way.

At the end of the day, “Tourist” is an amusing yet elegant thriller, complete with an excess of fabulous designer suits — but not a masterpiece.