Lost in translation

There's only one original feature in veteran Sydney Pollack's new thriller, and that is the United Nations' headquarters location in New York. Even Hitchcock was given the brush-off when he asked to film in the building.

Otherwise, this story, adorned as it is by two former Oscar-winners - Sean Penn, as a CIA agent mourning the recent loss of his wife, and Nicole Kidman, as an interpreter who discovers a plot to assassinate an African president - wavers between a polished, glossy surface and a series of preposterous assumptions.

Would so unstable an agent as Penn's furrow-browed Keller be allowed to investigate such a plot, improbably planned to take place as the ageing president makes a speech at the UN?

Would the pretty interpreter, labouring under the memories of a bloody past in her native Africa, be able to get back into the apparently locked UN building to retrieve her handbag and thus overhear an incriminating tape rather carelessly left on her table?

Would the CIA, for all its recent blunderings, really be as stupid as Pollack paints them? The answer to this last question may be in the affirmative, but there's another disadvantage to the film and that is the fact that neither star has enough opportunity to fill out their character properly.

A putative romance between them, which the final sequence suggests could come to something, doesn't work and the pair often become peripheral figures to the thrills and spills that Pollack dispenses. Some of these work well, in particular the interpreter's bus ride with a bomb on board which careers through the Big Apple before exploding just as she gets off.

The real problem with The Interpreter is the old one of trying to make a political thriller that entertains as well as making you think. And the result is the equally familiar one of not really convincing on either level. It's undeniably professional and certainly good-looking, but it rolls along as if it's looking for an emotional centre that it can never quite find. Rather like the UN itself, some might say.

The Interpreter
Cert: cert12A