The Tourist, the romantic thriller co-starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp that opens today, currently has a 17 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Yikes! When critics see a movie they hate, they can get a little loopy. Looking over the reviews of The Tourist, it’s apparent the thing critics went loopiest about was Angelina Jolie. Her performance and (very skinny) appearance have been described with enough convoluted synonyms for “wooden” to make an English teacher go insane. Robots, puppets, mannequins, and Jessica Rabbit all make appearances. Check it out!
Let’s round ‘em up:
“She plays Elise, a mysterious — or at least frozen-faced — sophisticate opposite Mr. Depp’s Frank. Mr. Depp, possibly expressing displeasure at the production as a whole, plays his character with dead eyes and steadfast torpor. Ms. Jolie’s eyes aren’t dead, exactly, but they’re weirdly glazed, and they work in concert with her pursed lips and exclamation-mark posture to create a kind of sex robot who swans around Venice as if on an invisible runway.” —WSJ
“And while Jolie and Depp have strengths that could be utilized in those areas, each dials things down so low they seem to be in a tableau at Madame Tussauds.” —NYDN
“Jolie comes off like a cross between an alien and an impeccably attired mannequin. Her range of facial expressions goes from wide-eyed and serious to wide-eyed with a slight smile.” —USAT
“In the dud thriller The Tourist Jolie basically plays an overdressed, humorless live-action version of Jessica Rabbit, running around Venice dodging hired killers.” —NYP
“Less evocative of a Grace Kelly/Audrey Hepburn heroine than one made out of porcelain, Jolie portrays Elise Clifton-Ward” — WP
“If Trey Parker and Matt Stone want to make another marionette genre parody — the South Park duo’s all-puppet Team America: World Police took aim at action pics — they could cast Jolie as their lead. In her heels and wraps and sculpted ‘dos, she bobs with the slightly awkward air of a doll on strings. Grace(less) Kelly.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“But Jolie? Man, what happened to her? I don’t just mean to her arms, which here are as scarily spindly as any you’d see in a Tim Burton animated movie, but to her talent.” —MSN
“As played by Jolie in a series of drop-dead outfits, the femme-fatale-and-a-half Elise is less the flesh-and-blood woman Evelyn Salt was and more a well-dressed mannequin who wears clothes better than she engages emotions.” —LAT
And then just one about Depp, for good luck:
“Wearing a haircut resembling a dead beaver and looking puffy around the face, Depp deliberately downplays his lady-killer looks and slows the speed of his intellect to a crawl” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
