Duplicity

I was right.  Clive Owen has been pigeonholed.  Typecast.  Whatever you want to call it.  When Jason Statham gets typecast, the world keeps on spinning none the wiser.  But Clive Owen is a very good, talented, subtle actor, whose abilities lend themselves to movies with meat on their bones.  He’s a businessperson who needs money, as everyone understands, but picking another movie with a wildly absurd plot, a thousand and one plot twists, and Julia Roberts?  C’mon, Clive.  You can do better than this.  And so can Tom Wilkinson.  Not to mention Paul “Yale” Giamatti.

Duplicity is, if nothing else, a movie whose title is even more apropos than expected.  Two companies who essentially have nearly all the marketshare are cutthroats, willing to do whatever it takes to take the other guy down.  The CEO’s, presumably, are played by Wilkinson and Giamatti, two ruthless and idiosyncratic dictators whose companies are their very raison d’être.  The movie centers around these two companies and the one product that each thinks will destroy the other.  Roberts and Owen play ex-undercover agents with shady pasts and a sense of skepticism that is appropriate for a movie called Duplicity.  Each thinks the other is out to get the…well…other.  And the movie rolls on for two hours and a bit, and the characters don’t really change much, and the plot doesn’t really get interesting until the aforementioned “bit.”  The twists are as implausible as they are well acted.  Which is to say highly implausible because very well acted.

Julia Roberts is, for all else she may be, a very one dimensional actress.  Her performance here is not much different.  She comes in, shows little to no emotion, says a few lines unconvincingly, and leaves.  Then she repeats the process like a prosaic shampoo label.  Clive Owen, on the other much more dexterous hand, is a great actor.  He does his best in his movies, but sometimes his role leaves something to be desired.  The seasoned veteran Wilkinson never disappoints, in my opinion, and this movie is absolutely no different.  He commands each scene, however poorly constructed or simply written.  His presence is a force to be reckoned with, and each scene he is in is a treat that this movie gives to its oft-beleaguered audience members.

The direction takes a lot of its “inspiration” from the Oceans trilogy, from its use of montage to its music choices.  The problem is that it isn’t nearly as good as any of the Oceans movies, and not nearly as clever.  It has a big bucks cast, but not even they can drag this movie out of mediocrity and convolution.

Clive Owen has not made me happy so far in 2009.  He needs to step up his game, or at least pick movies where he actually has half a chance to shine.  Maybe it’s the economy, stupid.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that this movie is too long, too uninteresting, and too implausible to be enjoyable.  Skip it, and wait for Owen to do something worth your time and money.

Rating: 2/4 Stars