Director: Tony Gilroy

Runtime: 128mins

Many may remember Tony Gilroy’s 2007 debut feature, Michael Clayton, which starred George Clooney and earned Tilda Swinton an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Somehow that one slipped underneath my radar, so Duplicity was my first encounter with Gilroy-as-director, though he has worked as writer and producer on numerous other films.

What immediately struck me about the opening sequences of Duplicity, and to some degree this is a quality of the film as a whole, is the sense of it being something of a ‘poor man’s Soderbergh.’ Funky, ‘70s soul on the soundtrack, split-panel editing, some sporadic, highly stylised camerawork, jump backs and jump forwards, and of course a classically stylish leading pair in Clive Owen (Ray Koval) and Julia Roberts (Claire Stenwick). All the key ingredients are there, and they’re very good. It just doesn’t feel as unique and hip as perhaps Gilroy wants you to think it is.

Ray and Claire are intelligence operatives who quit their government jobs to hit the private sector as corporate spies. Their plan is to work clandestinely for different corporations, playing them off one another, land a massive windfall then get out of the game for good. Claire works for Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) while Ray, who walked away from a twelve-year career with MI-6, works for Richard Garsik (Paul Giamatti, who almost overshadows the leads with his ferocious, comedically neurotic performance). The scheme revolves around a new, super-secret cosmetic product that, once launched into production, will revolutionise cosmetics and make the shareholders of Tully’s firm incredibly rich. Garsik, Tully’s bitter rival, wants the formula before it’s publicly announced. And so the cat and mouse game begins.

As you’d expect from a crime/thriller/spy movie, the action moves through a variety of glamorous locations, from Dubai, New York, and Rome, to Zurich. There’s no gunplay or car chases, instead, the action is generated by the quickly paced plot itself. Just as Ray and Claire struggle to trust each other – both are suspicious that they’re being ‘played’ by the other – the audience is never quite sure whether they are themselves being played by the film.

This is a fun excursion, but really, we’ve all been on it, or at least on ones like it, before. Despite its clever plot, twisting on a complex axis of numerous double-crosses and red herrings, the film never seems to shake off its most obvious influences to become something worthy of judgment wholly on its own merits. Still, if you don’t favour originality as much as I do, you won’t be disappointed by Duplicity. It’s certainly not boring, you probably won’t see the ending coming, and if nothing else it’s proof positive that Julia Roberts has still ‘got it.’

***½

ADAM DODD

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