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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Film This Week in the Film Section: Duplicity

Posted by Lindy West on Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 3:09 PM

Duplicity, starring Julia Roberts's humongous mouth and Clive Owen's chest hair (click on the picture! Click on it!!), opens this Friday. It is medium-good:

Duplicity—the new corporate-espionage comedy from Michael Clayton writer/director Tony Gilroy—opens with a lady-spy named Claire (Julia Roberts) meeting and seducing a man-spy named Ray (Clive Owen), then, obviously, drugging him and stealing all his important spy shit (documents!). Thankfully, the film is smarter and more self-aware than this initial little puddle of boilerplate suggests.

Over the next five years (Duplicity unfolds and refolds in flashes back and forward), Claire and Ray strike up a romance, then a scheme to bilk two pharmaceutical giants out of millions so they can retire to a big, cozy, espionage-free love nest forever. Duplicity becomes, equally, your traditional origami thriller of double-, triple-, and quadrangular-crossing, and an exploration of the emotional stress inherent in being one professional liar in love with another professional liar. "Nobody trusts anybody," says Ray. "We just cop to it."

Read the whole thing here.