R S This is a film that is desperately trying to sound clever. Unfortunately it expends so much effort on this, not well I might add, that it wastes a better than expected, if not stellar, turn from both leads.A theme throughout the film is that things a made more complicated than they need to be, both for the audience and characters. In fact this film identifies something, that in my mind, is more pernicious than a regular plot hole, a total lack of clarity in the motives of the characters. Some logistical oversight I can forgive, but if a filmmaker cannot reveal why a character is engaged in all these extra complicated plot points the film is lost.SPOILERS FROM HERE ONAs a counter example take memento by Christopher nolan. Very complex plot vs story film told through flashbacks, yet we understand why everyone does what they do: memory loss and deception. There is value in piecing it together to show how the story unfolds. Duplicity uses flashbacks, is not even as complex, but doesn't provide reasons for it. Both leads 'deceive' the intelligence teams through planned and scripted encounters, exotic rendezvous etc. but none of it is necessary and so doesn't make sense. This all plods on for a while making sense even if often unnecessary until at the end we are given a clanger, which I'm still surprised others don't note. It is revealed Tom wilkinsons character planned to find two fraudsters (Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, not just Paul giamatti) all along. I find myself screaming WHY?! He doesn't need to do this, doesn't know them, has a genuine goal of duping giamatti (which he does: this bit is fine) yet risks his entire plan by wasting time making things unnecessarily complicated. Before anyone says hes punishing them: no. He constructs the crime they commit before they know about it: essentially entrapment.. The real stinker is that to dupe the two he needs precisely the same resources (a mole in equistrom) to dupe giamatti so why does he deliberately seek out two (unknown to him fraudsters). Whilst not being a plot hole per se it makes no sense for him to do this: there is no motive at all. It is simply a cheap plot trick. You might as well take any film and change the ending by cutting to a character having masterminded every turn in the plot. It's not hard to do UNLESS you give them a believable motive throughout. This film does not have it and so it resorts to the intellectual equivalent of '...but it was all a dream'.Terrible.

James Hitchcock "Duplicity" is a film about spies, although not about secret agents in the sense that devotees of Ian Fleming or John Le Carré would understand the term. Admittedly, the two main characters, Ray Koval and Claire Stenwick, start off working for MI6 and the CIA respectively, but they soon abandon their careers for the much more lucrative world of industrial espionage.The plot centres upon the rivalry between two multinational companies, Burkett & Randle and Equikrom. Ray works for Equikrom; Claire works for Burkett & Randle in their corporate security department. Or at least she ostensibly does. In reality, she is a corporate spy employed by Equikrom to steal Burkett & Randle's trade secrets, especially details of a highly secret new product they are developing, and Ray is her handler.Or is the true position even more complex than that? As its title might suggest, "Duplicity" is the sort of film where the audience are, for virtually its whole length, left in the dark as to what the true position is, as to who is trying to double-cross whom and who can trust whom. It gradually emerges that Ray and Claire are lovers, who are conspiring together to cheat both companies and sell the secret to the highest bidder. Or are they…….? As is common in films of this nature, twist follows twist; there is a neat twist at the end whereby Dick Garsik, the corrupt, amoral Chief Executive of Equikrom is hoist with his own petard.There is, however, to be no similar come-uppance for the equally amoral Ray and Claire. The film is sometimes described as a romantic comedy, but the emphasis is less on romance than on the characters' complicated scheming. It is essentially a disguised heist movie, with the heist movie's typically relaxed attitude towards those who illegally or dishonestly enrich themselves at others' expense. Theft and fraud are not wrong, provided that the thieves or fraudsters are cool and attractive, that their crimes are carried out with daring, style and panache and that their victims are guilty of some crime, if only of the crime of not being cool and attractive themselves. Julia Roberts, who stars as Claire here, also starred in the "Ocean's" franchise, which was based around a similarly dubious code of ethics. Other recent examples include "Entrapment" and the remake of "The Italian Job"; there appears to be a belief among Hollywood scriptwriters that women as attractive as Roberts, Catherine Zeta Jones and Charlize Theron are, or should be, exempt from the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Steal".This is a slick, glossy piece of film-making, but it suffers from two defects. We are unable to identify with its hero and heroine for two reasons. The first is that their lack of moral scruples makes them inherently unsympathetic. The second was encapsulated by Roger Ebert in his review of the film. Writing of the frequent plot twists, he said "'Duplicity' is entertaining, but the complexities of its plot keep it from being really involving: When nothing is as it seems, why care?" It is certainly not the only film to suffer from these defects- indeed, an increasing number of films in recent years, the "Ocean's" films being good examples, have also been made in the same style, weaving labyrinthine and less than plausible plots around amoral and less than admirable characters. Watching "Duplicity" I frequently found myself asking "Why care?" 5/10

wilsr Good news and bad news.First the good news: I didn't pay AUS$10 to see this movie at the local cinema.The bad news is that I did pay AUS$8.99 for the DVD.What on earth induced the cast to agree to appear in this dog? Is Ms Roberts really that short of cash? I can only think that, because they were able to read the script (there *was* a script?) they could see how it all worked out at the end. Then they (not, unfortunately, the audience) might - just might - be able to retrospectively piece together the disconnected storyline that came before the denouement.Just because a director knows how a storyline develops doesn't give him the OK to make it so disjointed as to be unintelligible and then call it intellectual, challenging, clever or even interesting. It's just disjointed. Period. One could throw in self indulgent for good measure.There's nothing wrong with constructing a plot line that doesn't have the clues jumping out in your face - of course that's an essential part of a good movie - but to use multiple flashbacks covering most of the developed world in random time order as this movie does is just insulting.My wife and I sat through this ghastly mishmash of a film right to the bitter end: every so often a voice from the other chair would say "Do you have any idea what's going on?" and sometimes "Is it almost over?" I won't make any comment on the cast, the acting, the cinematography and so on - *nothing* could save this moronic effort.

rohitrd Somewhere halfway in the movie I was thinking - Do I really care what happens? It may be a clever movie, but it does not feel personal, you don't feel for anybody in the movie. Luckily for me, I continued watching the movie. And by the end of this movie I was completely taken. It is only after the end that I realised we were completely manipulated to feel a bit impersonal early on, and then build the characters - who seem cold and distant - from there on. So full marks to the direction and the script. And to the lead pair too - they do not give you a hint. There are other things I liked in the movie too - the way it keeps playing with you again and again and again. Like that one key dialogue in the movie - repeated many times in the movie, but always with a different context, where some time you know nothing, sometime you know a little bit more than some characters, and in the end when you actually know almost everything. If you have seen the movie, you'd know which one, so I won't spoil it. Alright, there are some giveaways, where you know what you see is not what is happening - but then you still do not know the whole thing. All in all - its a very clever movie in that it sucks you in, and makes you keep thinking even after it ends. Great achievement by Tony Gilroy in the writing and direction. I am eagerly waiting for his next ..