The Tourist: A very Jolie adventure for Johnny

Have you ever watched an old Hitchcock caper starring Cary Grant and murmured ‘they don’t make them like that any more’? If so, The Tourist is the picture for you.
It’s a glossy, sophisticated, gloriously improbable romp — escapist fun for these austere times.
A shy, unassuming American tourist on a train to Venice (Johnny Depp in the Cary Grant role) is lured by an absurdly glamorous Englishwoman (Angelina Jolie, never more sensually enigmatic) into a devilish web of dangerous intrigue.

Dangerous intrigue: A shy American tourist (Johnny Depp) is lured into a devlish web by glamorous Englishwoman Angelina Jolie in The Tourist

First, the British police (under a grumpy Timothy Dalton and a fanatical Paul Bettany) and then Russian gangsters (led by a Bond-villainish Steven Berkoff) wrongly identify him as an elusive master-criminal.
He’s also being followed by a dark, handsome, mystery man (Rufus Sewell at his most laconic). Who on earth could that be?
The Tourist has been promoted as an Oscar contender, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is a luxurious trifle with nothing serious to say — a vastly superior version of the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz misfire, Knight And Day.
The good news is that there are twists and chases a-plenty, and it juggles its hoary old clichés with supreme confidence.
A remake of an abstruse 2005 French thriller called Anthony Zimmer (which starred Yvan Attal and Sophie Marceau), it’s written with tongues firmly in cheek by the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who gave us the much more critically respectable The Lives Of Others, that consummate professional Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) and Christopher McQuarrie, whose best work this is since The Usual Suspects.

At least three other scribes were involved — Jeffrey Nachmanoff, William Wheeler and Jerome Salle, but their names appear to have dropped off the credits, along with any mention of Anthony Zimmer.
The film’s had more than its share of production difficulties, with a couple of directors (Lasse Hallstrom and Bharat Nalluri), two male stars (Tom Cruise and Sam Worthington) and one leading lady (Charlize Theron) all falling by the wayside.
Fortunately, those problems aren’t visible onscreen. It may be significant that none of those who have dropped out has ever been noted for his or her sense of humour.
The end product is extremely silly, bordering on high camp — so much so that it might easily have been directed by Baz Luhrmann.
I guessed what it was up to from reel one, but that didn’t stop me from being thoroughly entertained all the way to its joyously barmy conclusion.
Not to be taken even half-way seriously, this is — if you’re on the right, ironic wavelength — the most nostalgic of escapist pleasures.