We start off with an attractive but mysterious woman Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) receiving a letter from her lover, the even more mysterious master thief Alexander Pearce, in a cafe to pick up a random stranger sharing his height and physique from a train and pass it off for him, because Pearce knows that he is being hunted by Interpol and the Mob. She does so, and her pick is a hapless American schoolteacher from Wisconsin called Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp). The hapless schoolteacher finds himself in over his head when on what should have been dream vacation to Venice with a beautiful woman turns into a nightmare as Frank’s would-be enemies from both sides of the law come after him.
To believe in this movie, you have to believe in a Venice that’s eternally romantic and where everyone is romantic, dapper or comical, you have to believe in mysterious action girls that despite dressing far more conservatively than their comic book sisters, don’t have a single hair out of place by the time they’ve completed a boat chase through Venetian canals with Russian villains in tow, you have to believe that dance numbers start on cue at the height of romantic banter in luxurious ballrooms, you have to believe all that so much that your effort in suspension of disbelief will be taxed to the extent of believing wholly in the story. A movie like this needs to be larger than life, to have characters that are aware they are living inside a movie, aware that no one in real life doing their professions will remotely resemble them, aware that their traipse through exotic locations should feel more like a travelogue special than an action adventure.
Angelina Jolie is the half of the duo that gets it. Her character Elise Ward is less than a person than a main character in an overlong perfume or diamond commercial; who despite being one good-looking person in a movie full of good-looking people, makes men swoon and act in slow-motion upon the mere sight of her alone. You expect an endorsement for Givenchy, DeBeers or Elizabeth Arden to appear when she’s onscreen, and rightly so. Johnny’s Frank Tupelo is a little over-realistic; pensive, thoughtful, passive, morose. He looks out of place in the film’s whimsical old world settings, and bogs down what is supposed to be a witty and fast-paced film, not aided especially by Donnersmarck’s deadly serious direction.
After his Oscar-winning debut The Lives of Others, German director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck turns in an entry that is fairly disappointing for all the talent involved; co-writers Julian Fellowes and Chris McQuarrie, the excellent supporting cast including Paul Bettany, Steven Berkoff and Timothy Dalton, and most of this talent falls prey to the earnest but sometimes fatal notion to good storytelling that it’s all about believing in your own story in order for the audience to effectively suspend disbelief. Such a belief works for much of the time, but there are some stories in which the audience can only be most involved when they are aware of how much disbelief they are suspending; this is one of them. The result for The Tourist is a merely entertaining but preposterous thriller that doesn’t quite find its tone.