Film Reviews

Duplicity

• Rating:
• Director: Tony Gilroy
• Starring: Clive Owen
• Details: US / 120mins (15A).

Former MI6 operative Ray Koval (Owen) is a slick corporate spy whose clandestine missions have one goal - find out what businessman Howard Tully (Wilkinson) has up his sleeve before Ray's boss and Tully's sworn enemy, CEO Richard Garsick (Giamatti), makes his speech to his shareholders in eleven days time. Tully is about to announce a new 'product' he's been working on, something that will be worth billions, and Garsick wants it for himself whatever it may be. However, Tully has his own 'Ray' - another slick corporate spy in Claire Stenwick (Roberts) - and when the two meet, sparks fly and they hatch a plan to steal this 'product' for themselves. Can the two play the powerful businessmen off each other? Duplicity, or Ocean's Fourteen if one was to be cynical, is a comedy thriller that's so in love with itself, it stops to admire its convoluted plotting in every mirror it passes. With a tasty Maguffin in 'the product' keeping the audience in their seats until they find out what it is, writer/director Gilroy fills the time with a fractured plotline - flashbacks and forwards are the order of the day - and the chemistry between Owen and Roberts. Where the flashbacks and forwards are sometimes confusing and irritating, there's not a lot of sex between Owen (a fine actor but this role had to have been written with Clooney in mind) and Roberts. Both are cold fishes here and it's hard to believe that they're attracted to each other. With Michael Clayton and the Bourne trilogy on his CV, Gilroy loves his detailed dramas played out by three-dimensional characters; with Duplicity, however, the characters' actions are determined by the plot and its twists rather than the other way around and this results in everything feeling forced.

Review by Gavin Burke