Duplicity

Famed director Tony Gilroy's latest effort, Duplicity, is a mixed bag. Clive Owen is Ray and Julia Roberts is Clare, and they are MI6 and CIA agents respectively. After two one-night stands they team up to extract themselves from their agencies and go private, intent on swindling both sides out of millions of dollars to set themselves up for the rest of their lives. So they sign on with a private corporate group intent on stealing the formula to a rival's new product--but the question is who is playing who?

The main draw of this film is how paranoid it makes you. Really. When the two leads constantly question each other, nervous that the other will take off with all the funds, the audience is constantly running through the maze wondering who is on whose side. The slick filming and direction may set the tone for this quirky, offbeat spy movie, but the plot gets a bit too convoluted to follow, and lacks a big reveal which should be a payoff for the audience. It's still engaging, however, as is the dialogue between the two leads--or what little there is of it--minus the one embarrassingly mushy love confession. Most of their relationship is sexual, but since it's a spy movie, whatever.

The film does suffer, at times, from info-dumping, which doesn't come off quite as eloquently as it did, in, say, something like Oceans 11. As Dick's team explained all their intricate little spy tricks to him I was rolling my eyes.

The callousness and scheming of corporate america is totally trashed here (I approve!), and Paul Giamatti is brilliant in his portrayal of egotistic, maniacal corporate executive Dick Garsik. In fact most of the cast is stellar. The movie has a notably good soundtrack, with a lot of Spanish-sounding tracks to empahsize the sexiness of it all. The characters themselves might not be particularly complex, the plot might be too complicated at times, but the fun is all in navigating the labyrinth of who is using who, and the heart-pumping action is thrilling. Even if the ending was a bit lackluster, I enjoyed the very last scene immensely, and was glad to have good old Clare and Ray back from their hiatus as fast-talking spies instead of people-who-make-really-trite-and-hackneyed-love-speeches.

-elln