Something to watch tonight: Thursday 27 March

Duplicity (Gilroy, 2009)

After being a bit mean about Clive Owen yes­ter­day, I thought I should recall a per­form­ance of his in a film that I’m genu­inely fond of.

You’ll often find me rail­ing against the Hollywood machine in these pages – the life­less and cyn­ic­al, the focus-grouped and beta-tested, the band­wag­on jump­ing and the shark jump­ing – so it makes a pleas­ant change to loudly praise a film whose strengths are a pure expres­sion of old-fashioned Hollywood virtues.

Duplicity is a star-driven caper movie, fea­tur­ing ter­rif­ic easy-going per­form­ances by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen – play­ing two former spies now in the cor­por­ate secur­ity busi­ness. They team up to play their two cli­ents off against each oth­er for a secret for­mula that will change the world, and dis­cov­er that big busi­ness plays for keeps.

It’s true that no one ever leaves the theatre hum­ming the struc­ture, but I must give cred­it to writer-director Tony Gilroy’s eleg­antly con­struc­ted screen­play and his (lit­er­al) ACE in the hole, edit­or broth­er John Gilroy. Duplicity is sharp, witty and very easy on the eye: great old-fashioned entertainment.

Tony Gilroy’s cur­rent pro­ject is the superb Star Wars thrill­er Andor and sea­son two of that is due next month.

Also reviewed in that March 2009 Capital Times column: Atom Egoyan’s dis­ap­point­ing Adoration (“… it isn’t the first time that a great dir­ect­or has tried to tackle the post 9–11 world and failed to find the appro­pri­ate vocab­u­lary or tone”); ath­let­ics doc­u­ment­ary The Spirit of the Marathon; Al Pacino as Shylock in Michael Radford’s “grip­ping” ver­sion of The Merchant of Venice; and Hugh Dancy cos­play­ing Hugh Grant in the “shal­low” rom­com Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Where to watch Duplicity

Aotearoa: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on Paramount+ or FoxtelNow

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Streaming on Hotstar

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: Digital rental

Comments

Interesting chat in the com­ments on my Monday new reviews news­let­ter about the per­ils of being put off a film by the online dis­course and why trus­ted review­ers (ahem) are still important.