Writer-director Tony Gilroy had a huge success with his 2007 corporate thriller Michael Clayton, which made an Oscar-winner of Tilda Swinton as the chillingly ambitious legal executive. His new movie is in a similar milieu, but comes in the lighter form of a romantic caper.
Clive Owen and Julia Roberts play Ray Koval and Claire Stenwick: two ex-agents, respectively MI6 and CIA, now working as industrial spies for a Manhattan cosmetics firm, owned by jumpy, paranoid Dick Garsick (Paul Giamatti). Claire goes undercover in a rival company, whose control-freak CEO Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) is given to musing on the nature of power while fastidiously pruning the bonsai tree in his colossal minimalist office.
Claire feeds top-secret info back to Ray about Tully's hush-hush new haircare product, worth zillions. Ray and Claire are having an affair, naturally, but in this world of triple-cross and quadruple-cross, they can trust no one, especially not each other.
This movie awakened for me vague memories of the 1967 Doris Day comedy Caprice, in which Day plays a cosmetics inventor drawn into a web of intrigue - but originality isn't the issue. The problem is that though everything looks slick, the film gets pretty dull halfway through and Owen and Roberts don't for a moment look as if they are really in love or even fancy each other all that much. It's another showreel opportunity in support of Clive Owen's 007 job application - but not much more.