The Tourist
- Title: The Tourist
- IMDB: link
I haven’t seen Jérôme Salle’s Anthony Zimmer, the original French film on which this American version is loosely based. What I can tell is The Tourist is the kind of enjoyable summer flick you don’t usually find in the midst of family holiday flicks and more dramatic Oscar fare.
Johnny Depp stars as American tourist Frank Tupelo who just happens to be in the wrong place at the right time when the lovely Elise (Angelina Jolie) sits down next to him on the way to Venice.
Unfortunately for the math teacher, this mysterious woman isn’t so much caught up by his charms as she is using him as a stand-in for the man she loves. On instructions from the mysterious Alexander Pearce, Elise chooses a man on the train the same height and build of her former lover in order to throw suspicion away from the thief who is evading both police (Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, Alessio Boni, Giovanni Guidelli) and the mobster (Steven Berkoff) from who he’s stolen millions.
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Originally intended as a vehicle for Tom Cruise Salt was shelved and then given an impromptu sex change operation to ready the way for Angelina Jolie to headline the shoot ’em up. When your leading man becomes a leading lady the original script by Kurt Wimmer (Ultraviolet , Street Kings) had to be rewritten by Brian Helgeland (Conspiracy Theory, Assassins, Man on Fire), and director Philip Noyce (The Bone Collector, Clear and Present Danger) was tasked to make it all work. That’s an awful lot of time and effort to put into a project well before shooting was scheduled to begin. Too bad it wasn’t worth it.
Based on a true story the film, set in Los Angeles of the 1920’s, tells the tale of Christine Collins (