- Review by Ramon Watkins

Imagine the films we’ve seen in the cinemas so far this year are a graduating class – Duplicity is the underachiever…by a long shot. A premise vaguely reminiscent of Ocean’s Eleven and Entrapment doesn’t keep this film from tripping over itself all the way to the end credits, achieving none of the glory bestowed upon these two earlier masterpieces. Yes, Michael Clayton was stroke of genius, but that victory hasn’t saved director Tony Gilroy the embarrassment of Duplicity. If anything it has left audiences stunned at the sheer drop in integrity between the two films. Perhaps, like Coppola before him, Gilroy is destined to take the Hollywood hit-and-miss path.

One thing’s undeniable – this film tries to be stylish. Whether it fails or not in this respect is really up to how critical you want to be. Personally I consider the visual style to be overstated – think Ocean’s Eleven on steroids, or picture a nine year old mucking around with amateur editing software. The thing is, we’ve seen it all done before, done better and with a clearer plot and more accomplished acting and a more straightforward story to go with it. That is this film’s most outstanding problem – there is no story. Contrary to plot, which is factual and entails physical events, the story of a film should trace the development of character and lead to the resolution of a credible subtext. Duplicity has none of this. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are just as uncomfortable in each other’s presence in the last scene as they are in the first. They do not grow or learn from their experiences at all, and therefore we do not sympathise with them.

This brings me to the reason I actually fell asleep for a short while in this movie – NOBODY CARES. And not only are we dangerously impartial to the characters, there is no subtext in the film to tell us what it is about on a deeper level. Sometimes filmmakers can get away with this if they work to a formula and deliver riveting twists and turns, but Gilroy doesn’t. Yes, it is about duplicity – we got that from the title. But that sort of single-mindedness usually constitutes a B-movie, doesn’t it?

The casting in Duplicity is regrettable. We all learned from Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich, and just about every other film she’s starred in that Julia Roberts is able to do one thing extremely well: vulnerability. She is incredibly one-dimensional but at the same time she is one of the most respected actresses in Hollywood, and has been for nearly twenty years. The role of Agent Claire in Duplicity should never have found its way to her, because Claire is not vulnerable. On the contrary she is cunning, deceitful and just plain unlikeable, much like MI6 Agent Ray, played by the constantly bumbling Clive Owen. Does he always appear as if he’s stumbled onto a film-set by accident and is trying to figure out where to stand? The two agents are pitted against each other until they fall in love and subsequently decide to steal a fortune by working as spies for two rival multimillion dollar companies, the heads of which are magnates Richard Garsik and Howard Tully, locked in a long and fierce corporate battle. Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, who play the rival businessmen, are seasoned actors in their own right, but Duplicity gives us barely a glimpse at their characters. It is unfortunate that the longest period of time we spend with Tully and Garsik occurs at the beginning of the film in a heated confrontation between the two, a scene that the director saw fit to slow down, resulting in the most laborious title-sequence you will likely ever see. It seems Gilroy goes out of his way to make the flaws of this Duplicity so obvious.

Overall, this film’s plot, characterisation and story are all deeply flawed. Although each is so appalling in its own right, I’d like to single out the plot and venture that perhaps Duplicity would have made more sense and held our attention longer if it had been told chronologically. Instead, Gilroy conveys us back and forth needlessly, with the exception of one flashback near the end which was evidently the right choice. As is too often the case these days, the music in Duplicity is one of the film’s better facets. James Newton Howard, famous for his iconic E.R. theme and numerous film scores, crafts a slick and modern score which enhances the on-screen action when required and begrudgingly complements the frustratingly routine visual style of the film.

Verdict:

Instead of being pessimistic and suggesting that Duplicity represents a steadily decreasing standard in commercial filmmaking, I like to think of this film as an outlier, a fluke, and a disastrous one at that. There are good, slick spy thrillers out there – this just isn’t one. I’d suggest that Tony Gilroy’s next film be more traditional in its formula to assure success, as he really can’t afford to follow a failure with a failure.

[rating:0.5/5]

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