Davis P
Duplicity (2009) is a comedic/romantic espionage film. It stars Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, and features Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson in supporting roles. I had to watch this film twice in order to really understand it all because a lot goes on and at times it is a little hard to keep up. This is definitely not a film you can half pay attention to, if you do then you'll be like wait a minute, what the hell is going on?? Just go into this one knowing and expecting that. With that being said, there are so many things that Duplicity gets right. The casting is spot on for every character, I loved how they all portrayed their individual characters. The chemistry between Roberts and Owen is great, they have a relationship sometimes without complete trust, which is understandable given what they do for a living. This leads to numerous humorous exchanges between the two, and these exchanges are very well written, just like the entire film is. The writing is smart and it keeps you engaged. The ending is what I absolutely adore in this movie, I didn't see it coming at all and it is rather surprising. I highly recommend this entertaining, well put together film. 9/10.
GAWeldon
There have been a lot of really good movies about spies over the years, people risking their lives to protect their country/king/scientific secrets/etc. These can be very entertaining. I've never given much thought about corporate spies. These are (real) people who take jobs in businesses and steal their secrets (formulas, product ideas) and sell them to the competition. What a waste of a life that must be-constantly stabbing your employers, co-workers, and friends in the back for money. Not very noble, and not very entertaining.Duplicity takes 2 of these parasites and places them in a "comedy-romance". Forst of all, there was only one funny joke in the entire movie, and it had nothing to do with either star. Second, the 2 leads meet, fall into bed together immediately, and spend the entire movie not trusting each other while sleeping together and professing their "love".This is an ugly movie about nasty, dirty people. I really like Julia Roberts, but her character here was awful. I actually spent most of the movie hoping the "plan" they were working on would fail. The fact that no one in the movie was likable made the entire story hard to watch. No one was happy, no one was nice, no one was worth me spending 2 hours of my life with.The flashbacks and time jumps, while distracting and hard to follow at first, made sense by the end. They were necessary to keep the viewer from noticing that the story was very simple. 2 con artists get jobs as trusted experts at competing companies. They secretly work together to steal one company's formula with the help of the other company, only to screw THAT company in the end, too. What an awful group of people.
rowiko
It certainly looks very promising: A romantic spy thriller starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. What could there be not to like? Or so I thought. The movie, however, disappointed me all the way, or at least as far as I got. After 85 minutes I finally called it quits, as I couldn't face another 40 minutes of confusion, lack of plot and flashbacks by the bucket load. And the only regret I have is that I didn't stop sooner and used my time for something better. I found it hard to figure out what the storyline actually was, and the only conclusion I have come to is that there isn't one. I do like Clive Owen, and he's probably the only reason I watched thus far - him and the hope that it would actually get interesting at some point. OK, a few funny pieces of dialog along the way, but other than that, I could see nothing interesting about this movie, let alone thrilling.
wilsr
Good news and bad news.First the good news: I didn't pay AUS$10 to see this movie at the local cinema.The bad news is that I did pay AUS$8.99 for the DVD.What on earth induced the cast to agree to appear in this dog? Is Ms Roberts really that short of cash? I can only think that, because they were able to read the script (there *was* a script?) they could see how it all worked out at the end. Then they (not, unfortunately, the audience) might - just might - be able to retrospectively piece together the disconnected storyline that came before the denouement.Just because a director knows how a storyline develops doesn't give him the OK to make it so disjointed as to be unintelligible and then call it intellectual, challenging, clever or even interesting. It's just disjointed. Period. One could throw in self indulgent for good measure.There's nothing wrong with constructing a plot line that doesn't have the clues jumping out in your face - of course that's an essential part of a good movie - but to use multiple flashbacks covering most of the developed world in random time order as this movie does is just insulting.My wife and I sat through this ghastly mishmash of a film right to the bitter end: every so often a voice from the other chair would say "Do you have any idea what's going on?" and sometimes "Is it almost over?" I won't make any comment on the cast, the acting, the cinematography and so on - *nothing* could save this moronic effort.
AD
