Dunderheaded action picture

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2010)

It almost seems as if it were scheduled to make up for the headiness of Chris Nolan's Inception (yeah, I know, it wasn't THAT smart, but compared to the vast majority of American blockbusters...). It's pretty much a Bourne rip-off. It stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent who is exposed as a Russian sleeper agent by a Russian defector. Whether she is one or not, her bosses (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Liev Schreiber) decide to keep her under wraps. She'll have none of that, though, as she fears for the safety of her spider expert husband. So basically, like Bourne, it's about a defecting agent running from her employers while simultaneously trying to foil the bad guys. The film does have a couple of semi-clever twists, but it also contains a metric ton of stupidity. There's no real set-up for Jolie being some kind of Bourne-like superwoman, yet as soon as the action sequences start she's either MacGuiver or Jackie Chan. Weighing in at about 95 pounds (seriously, Angie, eat a burger) she's able to beat the everloving crap out of every trained CIA, FBI or Secret Service agent who gets in her way. The filmmaking is reminiscent of Bourne, but, unlike Bourne, the choreography is confusing and implausible. Very little of the plot makes any sense, from the reason for the initial exposure to Jolie's motivations to the final sequence. Any moderate examination reveals the film to make no sense whatsoever.