Super Frat

Clive Owen and Julia Roberts star as two spies that decide to steal $40 million dollars.  At the end of Duplicity, I had felt that I had been duped.

This is a rare case when a movie goes wrong and I don’t have lots to say about it.  It’s missing two elements:  1) Almost nothing clever really happens in the movie.  The scam involves a bunch of double crossing and not-very-clever trickery that depends upon knowledge of surveillance, which is virtually invisible.  2)  The characters are unlikeable.  Clive and Julia decide to steal the money because, well, they want it.  And, they actually have good jobs prior to that.  So it’s a little hard to get on board with their voracious greed.

Paul Giamatti does his standard tightly wound guy and Tom Wilkinson is barely in the movie.  Director Tony Gilroy, who wrote Michael Clayton and The Bourne Ultimatum, just drops the ball here.  Maybe his stars insisted on editing out all the cool stuff or something, I don’t know.  It just seems to me, that if you’re gonna make a movie about two very greedy people, they should crazily greedy and a bit quirky.  Clive and Julia may be good looking, but in this movie, they are actually kind of boring.  Scene after scene centers around them having sex and their mutual obsession with each other.  After a while, it’s just annoying and neither character has any depth beyond that.  And, I’m sorry, I just don’t buy Julia Roberts as a CIA agent.  In other movies, yeah, sure, but not in this one.  The whole piece just feels rushed.

I give Duplicity 3 keggers out of 10.  If you can see it on cable for nothing and you have 90 minutes to kill, you might be able to sit through this.   The movie is probably destined to be shown on airlines.