Duplicity

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

High star wattage doesn't fire up middling espionage comedy

Duplicity

may mark the return of Julia Roberts to a movie poster and a reunion with her Closer co-star Clive Owen.

But while it may test whether Roberts can still pack them in, maybe the question should be whether director-writer Tony Gilroy, in his second film as director following

Michael Clayton

- after making his mark with the Bourne trilogy scripts - can make the leap from espionage and corporate double-dealings to comedy.

Well he does, kind of, in a coolly funny movie about espionage and corporate double-dealings. But while it does its caper thing, it struggles a little to sustain the energy and humour as it stretches toward the two-hour mark.

Roberts and Owen are former CIA and MI6 intelligence agents who hatch a plan to get ahead in the private sector. To say much of more of the plot's machinations - which Gilroy delivers Russian doll-style, criss-crossing timelines and time zones, would be to spoil the movie's main fun factor.

But they do end up at rival corporations where one is a double agent and the other is the newbie, and where the respective CEOs (Wilkinson and Giamatti) are madmen we first see trying to beat each other up the runway between their respective private jets. It's a funny scene done slo-mo but it goes on too long, as does some other later sequences. And while Gilroy can sure deliver the sort of spy-switcheroo scenes which made the

Bourne

series so dazzling, here they are a little laboured.

The dialogue between Owen and Roberts has some snap - even when you're in on why certain encounters have a sense of deja vu. Though Roberts' funniest scene is when she says nothing but reacts with disdain to someone she's confronted in an interview room.

With its jaunty score and its frequent split-screens,

Duplicity

also feels like a throwback to sixties capers like

The Thomas Crown Affair

- its story of excessive corporate rivalry is much more contemporary of course.

If only Roberts and Owen had the chemistry Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo had in that remake,

Duplicity

might have had the zing to make it truly memorable rather than just mildly diverting.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson

Director:

Tony Gilroy

Rating:

PG (coarse language)

Running time:

125 mins