The Interpreter (-2.0 Money Trains)

It's been a while since I was subjected to this one, and I think I reviewed it at the time but managed to lose the original. So bear with me.

The Interpreter is a political thriller about corruption and murder in a ficticious southern African state, interestingly set in the UN headquarters in New York. It has a great (African) opening that's all grit and realism and excitement and portends a great movie to follow. Maybe because there's wasn't a lot of dialogue in this scene, the director, Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor - now that's a political thriller) had scope to achieve this. But come Scene 2 and the film relocates to New York, the script kicks in, and the "stars" get involved.

These last two points are the real undoing of the film. The plot is contrived like you wouldn't believe. For example, Silvia (the heroine who is an interpreter with the UN, more later) discovers an assassination plot and then becomes a target herself because:
1. Before going for drinks after work, she decides it will be easier to leave her musical instrument in the interpreting room rather than carry it around. Fair call for a tuba or a cello, but a flute?
2. Two plotters are discussing their scheme in the delegation hall of the UN, (which is, of course, covered in microphones), rather than in a hotel room somewhere.
3. They sit in their usual seats in the hall so that Silvia's interpreting room picks up the conversation, and she, of course, hearing something from her headphones, puts them on and uncovers the plot.
4. They see her and she runs rather than pretending nothing happened.

The rest of the plot is pretty poor, as well, but if we didn't see films because of a few schoolboy errors like that, we'd never go to the cinema at all. No, the reason not to see this film under any circumstances is Nicole Kidman.

Let's start with her character: she's meant to be a white southern African from a ficticious and corrupt southern African nation (think Zimbabwe) who speaks a ficticious language that is the lingua franca of southern Africa. That's fine, but you'd think that such a woman might have picked up a bit of a tan from her time in Africa. Or maybe some freckles, even. You'd also think her accent would sound kind of southern African. But it's as if Miss Kidman failed to read the script before filming and didn't do any preparation. This is reinforced when she opens her mouth. Her accent is atrocious and her acting is worse. She could have been (should have been) replaced with a potted ficcus. At least that would have been less wooden.

Nicole Kidman is possibly the worst actress in the world. Take away the admittedly tight body, and the reconstructed face and you will see that she is a talentless bimbo who should be relegated to doing films with the likes of Rob Sneider, Paulie Shore and Will Ferrell (no, I have no intention of seeing Bewitched), not Sean Penn. (For all his leftie mumbo jumbo "I've been to Iraq" crap as if anyone really cares what actors think, the bloke can act.)

With the script this film was lumbered with, it had the potential to be a forgetable, middle-of-the-road piece of cinema that not even afficionados would want to watch again. With Miss Kidman in it, it made it to my list of bad films, and earns -2.0 Money Trains.