‘What’s so different?’ asks Julia Roberts’ world-weary CIA agent in Duplicity’s opening scene, to which Clive Owen’s smugly well-suited MI6 officer duly quips back, ‘I guess that’s what I came over to find out…’ It’s a question we might well ask of this movie and one whose response ultimately proves just as evasive.
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy, the man behind last year’s surprise cinematic success Michael Clayton, Duplicity focuses once again on corporate corruption, albeit this time in a rather lighter vein. In place of the drawn-out stasis and aching sincerity of his debut we are here presented with a pacy black comedy that has more than a touch of the Coen brothers about it. But sadly it is the rather directionless farce of Burn After Reading that is more in evidence than the focused comic brutality of their earlier features.
Claire Stenwick (Roberts) and Ray Koval (Owen) are two jaded spies who have traded the public world of national security for the private world of corporate espionage. Employed by rival pharmaceutical companies, the two plot to buy their way out of their mutual tedium by playing both sides and stealing $40 million dollars. A simple enough plan you might think, but one that apparently involves 96 minutes of plot convulsions (yes, you feel every one of those minutes…) and more curves than a Playboy bunny.
There is much to like here; the chemistry between Roberts and Owen is every bit as intense as their last mutual outing in 2004’s Closer, and Gilroy’s ear for repartee, if in no way equal to Patrick Marber’s, is quick and agile. Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti both appear to relish their cameo roles as the rival CEOs and play shamelessly for laughs; yet somewhere along the line (more of a spiral really….) the movie loses its way and never quite recovers the sparkle of the start.
Its complex flashback-driven structure is both intrusive and unnecessary, seemingly an ‘arty’ device grafted onto a straightforward heist movie to give it more personality. While setting a movie with such huge stakes in the world of toothpaste and hair-gel is a pleasingly wry twist – never has drama been so unashamedly cosmetic – the bathos doesn’t adequately compensate for the loss of tension that results. We ultimately care as little about the fate of our two protagonists as we do about the hair-product they are so desperately scheming over.
If the secret of a good con-man is conviction then Tony Gilroy had better stick to his day job, because Duplicity ain’t fooling anyone.
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy, the man behind last year’s surprise cinematic success Michael Clayton, Duplicity focuses once again on corporate corruption, albeit this time in a rather lighter vein. In place of the drawn-out stasis and aching sincerity of his debut we are here presented with a pacy black comedy that has more than a touch of the Coen brothers about it. But sadly it is the rather directionless farce of Burn After Reading that is more in evidence than the focused comic brutality of their earlier features.
Claire Stenwick (Roberts) and Ray Koval (Owen) are two jaded spies who have traded the public world of national security for the private world of corporate espionage. Employed by rival pharmaceutical companies, the two plot to buy their way out of their mutual tedium by playing both sides and stealing $40 million dollars. A simple enough plan you might think, but one that apparently involves 96 minutes of plot convulsions (yes, you feel every one of those minutes…) and more curves than a Playboy bunny.
There is much to like here; the chemistry between Roberts and Owen is every bit as intense as their last mutual outing in 2004’s Closer, and Gilroy’s ear for repartee, if in no way equal to Patrick Marber’s, is quick and agile. Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti both appear to relish their cameo roles as the rival CEOs and play shamelessly for laughs; yet somewhere along the line (more of a spiral really….) the movie loses its way and never quite recovers the sparkle of the start.
Its complex flashback-driven structure is both intrusive and unnecessary, seemingly an ‘arty’ device grafted onto a straightforward heist movie to give it more personality. While setting a movie with such huge stakes in the world of toothpaste and hair-gel is a pleasingly wry twist – never has drama been so unashamedly cosmetic – the bathos doesn’t adequately compensate for the loss of tension that results. We ultimately care as little about the fate of our two protagonists as we do about the hair-product they are so desperately scheming over.
If the secret of a good con-man is conviction then Tony Gilroy had better stick to his day job, because Duplicity ain’t fooling anyone.