Duplicity (2009) – on rental. I know a lot of film goers like watching Julia Roberts. She was a relative unknown until her breakout role as a hooker with a good heart in 1990’s Pretty Woman, winning a deserved Golden Globe award for Best Actress at it. Funnily, I’ve never really had a thing for her or her films. She’s been a very large range of roles, many of them either commercially very successful or critically well-received. But while I don’t outright avoid films she’s in, I don’t go out of my way for them either.
That’s basically the reason why I gave Duplicity a miss when it showed up in theatres here earlier this year. Matt said on MSN though that he enjoyed the film, so I queued it up as soon as it was available on rental, and gave it a go with Ling on Friday evening.
What is this film about? Clive Owens and Julia Roberts star as Ray and Claire, two super corporate spies working for the same company Equikrom. The both have a mission: to find out what exactly is the super-secret product about to be introduced by Equikrom’s bitter rival, Burkett & Randle. The story is presented through several flashback sequences intermixed with the current moment, with each flashback providing yet more information on the background between the two lead characters.
The film has a wonderfully intelligent script that could require more than one viewing to fully digest, especially when the final scene reveals a whopper that’ll have you scrambling for the DVD remote to earlier scenes to see if you really missed that ‘thing’.
Owens and Roberts enjoy sizzling chemistry, helped especially by fun dialog. There’s an early scene where they compare their battle scars and resumes as they’ve both worked for rival espionage and spy agencies, and it’s outright hilarious.
The other scene that I rewound immediately to watch again was a scene when Claire as a double-agent in Burkett & Randle interrogates a staffer who was seduced by Ray into giving up company secrets. Claire doesn’t say a word, but her rage at the woman’s confession that she had no regrets as the sex was amazingly good is hilarious – especially since Ray and Claire are lovers! Too funny for words.
The two leads are supported by veteran actors, Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, who play the CEOs of Equikrom and Burkett & Randle respectively. Wilkinson doesn’t show up much in the film besides its start and the end, but Giamatti has a lot of screen-time. And he dials in his usual frenetic, slightly crazed character obsessed with finding out what his rival CEO is up to. Coincidentally, I’d just rewatched Shoot ‘Em Up several days earlier, and it’s great to see Giamatti and Owen in the same film again, even though in Duplicity they’re not primarily playing off each other this time.
On balance, it’s a great, romantic spy drama though I still enjoyed last year’s Get Smart remake with Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway even the more. And at the film’s end, Ling was lost and I myself was struggling to fully piece together what really happened in the story.
Still, if you don’t mind the mind-games the film plays on you, I’ll rate it a…
This is one of the few mainstream Hollywood films I watched in the theater this year that I enjoyed. I’m probably going to buy it on Blu-Ray so my mother can watch it. I suspect she’ll get a kick out of it too.