Entertainment : From the Front Row of the Balcony: 'The Tourist' is loved and disliked

     Generally speaking, if the critics and audience differ on their opinion of a movie, I will agree with the audience.

     “The Tourist” is one of those movies where the audiences and critics disagree most. According to “Rotten Tomatoes,” the movie with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie has a positive rating from only 20 percent of the critics but 78 percent of the audiences.

    I saw “The Tourist” at the Palace, and for the first hour, I thought I would be joining the 80 percent of the critics.

    How to describe the movie…

    Consider it part “Knight and Day,” a movie about a professional spy/undercover person who finds an unwitting innocent to help with a mission. Consider it part “Bounty Hunter,” a movie that is great when the two main stars are in scenes together, but not-so-good the rest of the time. Throw in a dash of “The Italian Job,” with unusual boat chases among the houses and waterways of Venice. Toss in a cup or two of lame spy-music soundtrack and unoriginal dialogue.

    That describes the first hour of “The Tourist.”

    Then when you are just about to give up – the Palace clock said 8:15 when this happened to me – the movie gets interesting. The last 45 minutes are fun and funny, even clever and charming at the end.

The story

    Elise (Jolie) – while being tracked by less-then-invisible cops from several European countries, is at a café when a courier brings her a message: Get on a train. Find a guy my size; make the cops think he is me, and come meet me. The message is from her ex-lover, a criminal named Alexander. The audience does not know much about Elise or how she came to be connected to this mysterious Alexander.

   On that train, she finds Frank (Depp), a Wisconsin math teacher, a widower whose young wife died in a car accident three years earlier. He looks about the same size as Alexander, show she befriends him. He follows, intrigued and attracted as he tries to figure out where she is going and what motivates her to follow Alexander. Meanwhile, Russian thugs have joined the chase, as a Russian mobster seeks to recover a large quantity of money Alexander has stolen.

Why you should go

     Johnny Depp fans who are used to seeing him in the roles of swashbuckling Captain Jack Sparrow or the outlandish but confident Willie Wonka will be surprised to see him play the innocent bystander, a teacher from the Midwest. It’s impressive to see him in this role – but not so impressive to see him running, in pajamas, from Russian assassins on the tops of tiled Italian roofs.

What you should know before you go

     Spy movies take a few minutes to set up the story. This one took nearly an hour. Perhaps that explains the 20 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes. But when it’s good, it’s good. And of course, Depp and Jolie are as good as their fans would expect them to be. The movie is rated PG-13 for violence, language and sensuality, but it’s very mild compared to other PG-13 films.

My favorite part

     I can’t say that there is one. But the dialogues with Depp and Jolie are clever and creative. I only wish “The Tourist” would have had a lot more of them, and a lot less of the other stuff.