The Tourist feels like a Chanel No. 5 advert directed by Carrie from Sex and the City* and written by art-assassin Dan Brown. In fact I’d rather watch nothing but the indulgent Chanel mini-movies while Baz Luhrmann sings show tunes at me through a rolled up copy of Grazia. That experience would, on balance, be less painfully pointless than this flimsy farce.

The reason for Carrie’s presence in the opening simile is that this film features persistent, tension-sapping dinkly-donkly music that sounds like it has been pulled from Home Alone and stuck onto what is ostensibly a thriller for adults. Or at least for people who are big enough to sit in a cinema without a booster seat. Dan Brown is mentioned because the dialogue is stupid, the plot is derivative and the triple A stars are reduced to stumbling through the whole thing with barely masked boredom.

If I had held off writing my Top 10 Worst Films of 2010 list until this week I would almost certainly have added The Tourist. It follows Elise, played by a near-skeletal Angelina Jolie, and Frank, played without conviction by Johnny Depp. Elise is a marked woman, followed by international security services because of her relationship with a criminal financier. She chooses Frank at random on a train bound for Venice to fool the authorities into thinking that he is her illicit lover, freshly returned from multi-million dollar appearance altering surgery. Frank is in reality a school teacher recovering from a broken heart. I imagine the director wanted sparks to fly between the mismatched pair as the romantic backdrop of water-veined Venice had its way with their senses. Sadly there is hardly a glimmer of engagement between Depp and Jolie. But this is not the film’s worst crime.

In this type of cat-and-mouse spy thriller genre we’re expected to suspend our disbelief, but the metaphysical bungee cord snaps repeatedly because the film is so incredibly lazy. It brought to mind a Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring two slobby, sloppy TV writers who create medical dramas and other relatively technical works without having a clue about the subject matter. Thus the opposing worlds of law enforcement and organised crime are covered in The Tourist in the shallowest possible manner. The lead villain of the piece is a British born evildoer who has Russian bodyguards and arbitrarily offs one of his subordinates after getting a suit fitted during a scene that feels like an afterthought and thus lacks any  of its intended menace.

Incredibly disappointing and not worth the price of a movie ticket, let alone the $100 million it cost to make, The Tourist is a cinematic irritant that overdoses on lightness and whimsy before dying in a pool of its own lethargic irrelevance.

*I know that she’s a fictional character. I’m not mad.