Hulking Norse warrior Thor (Chris Hemsworth) meets fetching New Mexican astrophysicist Jane (Natalie Portman) late one night while she and her assistants chase atmospheric disturbances in the desert. They get off to a bumpy start: she hits him with her van—twice—and he knocks her for a loop by claiming to be from Asgard and offering a revisionist approach to mapping the galaxy. Still, they hit it off. I’d love to tell you that this is how Thor begins. It would be so much more fun if, at least for a while, we could wonder if this was some sort of whacked romantic comedy, if our protagonist really might be some homeless, mentally ill Aryan with a gym pass and the unlikely hottie scientist wants to gobble him up him anyway. Alas, we already know he’s the genuine god of thunder thanks to a protracted prologue about the War with the Frost Giants and the troubled state of affairs in the glowing, surprisingly multicultural and deadly boring kingdom from which Thor has recently been exiled.
How cleaner, more compelling and a lot less stodgy and fanboy-tailored Thor might have been without that whole prologue (which consumes an entire quarter of the running time) or, for that matter, everything that happens in Asgard, where everyone delivers their stilted dialogue like bad theatre (the director is none other than pop Shakespearean Kenneth Branagh), no one has a sense of humour, and despite all the backstory the rules of godly combat remain incoherent: Thor is a rare example of a movie who's plot turns on a literal deus ex machina. Best WTF?! moment: Jeremy Renner shows up in the middle of this thing to do nothing but aim his bow and arrow at Thor.
At bottom, this adaptation of the Marvel Silver Age superhero comic is about dynasty. Thor was supposed to inherit the crown from his dad, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), but his response to an unexpected security breach proves that he hasn’t matured enough: Thor’s still too vain, cocky, a bearded banger dandy who would not look at all out of place playing bass for Maiden. So dad takes away his hammer and flings him to the mortals. Thor’s brother meanwhile is an insidious little rat trying to sneak his way to the top. They call him Loki, but trust me, there’s nothing low-key about this guy once he gets going. Eventually they’ll have to duke it out on earth and in the heavens, but their unfathomable powers, bathed in special effects, render their fights far too abstract to pack any real punch.
The movie opens with all these guys following Angelina Jolie around with cameras, scrutinizing her every move, so you could be forgiven for wondering if you’re watching a documentary. But no, this is Paris, Jolie speaks with an English accent, she receives an envelope with cryptic instructions, and we get about 40 different camera angles just to cover a half-minute of action—and if those clues don’t assure you that we’re in the realm of pure hokum, the deliriously fussy, overbearing, almost instantly annoying James Newton Howard score will. The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who helmed The Lives of Others. Like that earlier film, this one is heavy on surveillance. Consequence, not so much.
You could shave off the first 15 minutes of The Tourist and just start the thing with Jolie’s expensively tailored mystery vixen approaching Johnny Depp on a train, since he is, I think, our protagonist, or at least steals every scene from Jolie. She’s given precious little to do aside from look gorgeously worried; Depp, bearded and slightly husky-looking, at least gets to be funny and bumblingly charming. He’s terrific in their early exchanges. If only he and everyone else didn’t have to speak so many of their thoughts aloud. Redundancies accumulate, the bloat becoming near-palpable by the movie’s mid-point. I haven’t seen Anthony Zimmer, the French film The Tourist is based on, but if nothing else the original was at least shorter.
So Jolie uses Depp, a Wisconsin schoolteacher meandering through Europe on holiday, to mislead British fuzz and some nasty thugs led by a billionaire Steven Berkoff. The heavies all want to track down Jolie’s ex-lover to collect some six-figure debts—could Depp be that rascal in disguise? The Tourist is a Wrong Man movie, playing like Polanski Lite or neo-Hitchcock, with its doubles, snarling villains and chase scenes through the lovelier canals of Venice. If I sound grumpy it’s only because the movie had every reason to be fun, if forgettable. Unfortunately it’s far too dumb to generate suspense, and the deeply predictable “unpredictable” ending is wildly nonsensical. The movie also fails to offer us a single truly compelling character, one we can believe in, even on the story’s own flimsy terms. Jolie’s character wears this medallion on a bracelet that features the two heads of Janus. She says her mom gave it to her to remind her that everyone has two distinct faces. But after watching The Tourist, two sounds luxurious. Me, I would have settled for one.
