Sigh. Another dud by the iconic and once, believe it or not, very talented Brian De Palma. A Berlin set English-language version of the 2010 international hit Love Crime with Kristin Scott Thomas, the film focuses on a high-powered executive, Christine (Rachel McAdams), and her ambitious and talented employee, Isabelle (Noomi Rapace). The film opens with the women smiling and enjoying wine together as they try to devise an advertising campaign for a new mobile phone, but their bond later spirals into a volatile game of cat-and-mouse deception, seduction, and violence.

Deception! Seduction! Violence! Ingredients De Palma once spun into cinematic magic with pictures such as Dressed to Kill and Scarface, but now toys with in an inexpert, largely uninteresting way. There are a few moments of paranoid visual flair (a split screen here, a vertigo inducing shot of a spiral staircase there) which recall the master he once was, but almost every other element fails to connect. There is no sense of the drama unfolding within a larger context: real lives with real pasts, for example, or a real city or a real company with real financial clout. But, fine, De Palma has never focused on the realm of the real. Alas, there is also no scene-to-scene propulsion, the most important element in a purported suspense film, nor do the various motions toward the erotic and the macabre ever catch fire, playing instead as dim self-parody. And Rachel McAdams, a beautiful and gifted performer, is badly miscast as the high-heeled, high-strung corporate super-vixen we are meant to love to hate; despite a valiant try, she never locates the precise note of practiced cruelty required to render the character convincing, and she appears downright uncomfortable with the pain-and-power sexual elements of the story. Rapace is more confident and more convincing as the opaque lamb to McAdams' big bad blonde wolf, but this not will prove a highlight of her up-and-coming career.

I have heard the director's most ardent apologists' claims. It is not self-parody, it is a playful and self-referential experiment! He populates the frame with symbols of a high-end lifestyle to prove such and such point regarding consumerism! To be honest, even if such notions are part of the design, they come through with no joy and no wit.

C-