I have a weakness for caper movies. Perhaps I fancy myself as an arch-mastermind or something, I've never really thought about it. Whatever the reason is, I gravitate towards them and have a propensity to really enjoy them. This one is shit, though. It's not the best premise in the world- two ex-intelligence agency spooks make a killing in corporate espionage by playing one business off against another- but I've seen great films with far less of a plot than that. And in Roberts, Owen, Wilkinson and Giamatti the acting talent is certainly there. Visually too it's fine if all-too-similar to a dozen other movies you'll see this year.
But it's so leaden-footed, it lacks any zing! The (frankly all-too-obvious) denouement takes forever to arrive and underwhelm you. And the circuitous route the movie takes to get there- with it's chopped-up time-line and twist-on-a-twist narrative- is tedious and banal. The screenplay isn't complicated, it's just really badly transferred to the screen. Tony Gilroy's direction is lazy, the soundtrack is flat and uninspiring, the stars are sleepwalking with Wilkinson woefully underused and the film ends up a flabby mess.
And it's such a shame because a good, punchy movie about big corporations screwing themselves up through myopic greed could have really ridden the zeitgeist and got bums on seats. Duplicity isn't anything like as clever as it would like to think, nor anything like as inscrutable as the ham-fisted direction makes it appear. 2/10
