The Interpreter

Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn exchange fierce glances in this somber, humor-impaired meditation on... what, exactly? Set in motion by a completely implausible plot device (Kidman, who, working at the UN, is the interpreter of the title, overhears some completely incomprehensible mumbling late one night. As a result she is targeted by, presumably, people who are opposed to better diction.) The picture has a nice visual gloss to it but, aside from a tour de force sequence involving a bus, an assassin, a bomb, and a target, it never generates any narrative drive, suspense, or interest, let alone heat. Everyone walks around is if they are sleep-deprived, and the big revelations aren't terribly convincing or involving. The highly touted fact that some of the movie was actually filmed inside the UN doesn't help; they would have been better off using the energy spent on arranging this on a tighter script. The usually reliable director Sydney Pollack is off his game here.