Given the scarcity of frothy entertainment made for grownups of late, it’s easy to forgive a movie like Duplicity for some of its flaws. Granted, it’s not a finely tuned heist like the recent successes Inside Man or Ocean’s Eleven, but, borrowing its lead actors from those films, it manages to reach a fairly satisfying result, even if it wobbles on the rails along the way.
Clive Owen and Julia Roberts star as former MI6 and CIA agents, respectively, who retire into the world of corporate espionage. We meet them in a flashback, before their retirement from government work in Beirut, where they meet at a Fourth of July party and seduce each other. Owen wakes up the next day realizing he’s been had–she’s made off with the Egyptian air defense codes he was guarding. Years later they meet in Rome, where they resume their affair and begin to devise a strategy to make themselves filthy rich at the expense of the private sector. They land jobs at two fiercely competitive cosmetic & hygiene products companies, one of which seems poised to announce a new product which promises to be the Holy Grail of Bath & Bodyworks. These companies have intelligence and counterintelligence branches to put many countries to shame, and what follows is essentially a spy movie/romance that embraces the 21st Century’s rather depressing reality–that multi-national corporations have replaced the superpowers as the real movers and shakers of the world. The relative silliness of the products involved here, however, keeps things from getting too heavy. That and the slightly comic edge that Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson put on their rival CEOs.
But the show really wins or loses on the chemistry between its stars, and it works well enough to carry the film. Granted they’re not Tracy and Hepburn, but it’s not hard to believe they find each other interesting. Owen is probably about as American in sensibility as any British actor out there, and I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult. We haven’t seen Roberts in many major projects lately, and while she’s getting older, she’s still got beauty and charisma to spare. Their characters never seem sure of whether they trust each other, which only enhances the romantic and sexual tension between them. Not every actor pairing can pull that off. There are some flaws to note: the timeline is hard to keep straight, as are some of the details of the overlapping con-games going on all over the place. But after a summer punctuated by multiple hugely successful movies based entirely around toys (Lego and Viewfinder are among those which have been optioned for big screen adaptations–no joke), we need movies like this to succeed, so Hollywood doesn’t give up entirely on capers fit for adults. – [DVD]
Crime/Romance/Thriller
Rated PG-13
DVD Release Date: 8/25/09
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