Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) has been under constant surveillance for her connections with the elusive Alexander Pearce. She approaches the unassuming Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) on a train in an effort to divert the authorities attention to him while she tries to reconnect with Pearce and help us all solve the mystery of who he is.

This is the kind of movie that I expect to be released in the middle of February, when there isn’t anything good to be watched, but somehow it found a release in the middle of Oscar bait season. I’m quite baffled as to how this movie, as well as it’s leads, earned nominations at the upcoming Golden Globe awards with movies like Cyrus, The Other Guys and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World being snubbed for the category of Comedy/Musical. However, at this point all that’s left to be done is to actually talk about the actual film.

This movie is, at its core, all about the relationship between Elise and Frank. Frank is this math teacher from Wisconsin on holiday in Europe and Elise is this beautiful woman that’s approached him with the intent that a lioness approaches her prey.

Elise is like this massive ridiculous mystery and romance novel that you read on the train, but just like the movie that she’s in you really pretend to read it while at the same time forget every line of the book as you move along to the next as if you’re practicing the action of reading just to make sure you haven’t forgotten how to. This movie is unbearably boring dross and nothing more.

Jolie isn’t doing anything other than smiling at the camera and looking beautiful – which I can honestly say without any ill-will intended that is getting harder and harder for her to pull off as the years keep going by – and Depp is just doing his flustered routine that we’ve seen so many times before in much better films.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the writer and director of this movie, also wrote and directed the Academy Award winning film The Lives of Others took all his good will from the accolades his feature film debut gave him and took a hundred million dollar budget and went on to produce one of the most boring films I’ve seen all year. It tries to sit on the crutch of two well known actors that in any other film would’ve shined as great characters, no matter how tiny their roles, that bring nothing but smiles to my face. In this film however, I sat there staring at the actors smiling and just felt nothing. There was absolutely no chemistry between these two characters/actors that are supposedly falling in love on screen but it just never clicked. It felt more like they were amateur actors that were reading lines from a teleprompter in a rehearsal as opposed to watching an Academy Award winning Actress (Jolie) and a Golden Globe winning Actor (Depp) actually trying to deliver a professional performance.

I guess by now I’ve beaten this film to death so I should sum up with saying clearly and simply: I hated it. The movie was lost in mediocrity a long time ago and with little help from lazy execution it became straight up bad.

IMDB says 6.0/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 21%

I say 1.0/10