Derailed - film review

Derailed, a 2005 thriller, is a film I've watched a couple of times now. It's one of those movies that did not seem to go down well with the critics, but which has been relatively popular with audiences. Perhaps I watched it in tolerant mood, but overall I think it is much better than many reviews suggest - fast-moving, and with plenty of twists, several of them pretty good.

The set-up is, admittedly, not desperately original. A businessman (Clive Owen), married with a disabled daughter, is finding home life and work trying, and when he meets an attractive businesswoman (Jennifer Aniston, showing that there is more to her acting range than Friends), the result is predictable. They finish up in a seedy hotel - but an armed man breaks in, and what happens after that is life-changing.

Owen soon finds himself in a downward spiral of deceit and despair, and becomes a blackmail victim. The obvious (if unattractive) solution is to involve the police, all the more so when a man he is with is brutally murdered by the bad guy (cleverly played by Vincent Cassel, who was almost as unpleasant in Black Swan). But no, he has to do it his way, and this makes for tense watching, even though disbelief needs to be suspended somewhat. When the story seems to have come to an end, there is a coda set in a prison which I didn't see coming.

The film is based on a novel by James Siegel - one of many crime writers who has also had a successful career in advertising. Owen, an actor I really like, and Aniston are both very good, and Melissa George, who has a rather limited role as Owen's gorgeous but grumpy wife, is also appealing. Add Cassell to the mix, and you have a cast that makes the most of the script, and the resulte is very watchable.

Duplicity

Duplicity is a movie from last year which has the inestimable advantage of two charismatic stars, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, playing the lead roles of Claire and Ray. They are a pair of corporate spies who fall for each other and are involved, over a period of years, in a complicated story-line. It’s a glossy film, with a lot of potential, yet I had very mixed feelings about it.

We see the pair first meeting five years earlier in Dubai, at a 4th of July party at the US consulate. Ray seduces Claire, but it turns out that she is a CIA agent who drugs him and makes off with classified documents. But the two meet again, and become embroiled in a plot to exploit a secret product under development at a company run by Tully (played very well, as usual, by that versatile actor Tom Wilkinson)

There are numerous twists and turns in the story-line, and there were some very good moments. However, I felt that writer-producer Tony Gilroy wasn’t entirely sure whether he was making a romantic comedy or a light thriller. As a result, Duplicity seems to me to fall between two stools. It’s not consistently funny, and the plot-line is so tangled that I ceased to care about what happened to the secret formula..

Am I judging it too harshly? Perhaps. I was strongly recommended to watch it by a friend and perhaps my expectations were too high as a result. Roberts and Owen are very good in combination, but I wanted to be bowled over by this film, and I wasn’t. A more coherent narrative would, I feel, have improved it considerably.