Dédoublement

The fascination for depicting the criminal minds is an endless source of inspiration for studios trying to rise above the cliché that is usually present in most thrillers. And if you choose to unmask the villain at the beginning of the story, something else must hold the viewer's curiosity until the end.

"The Double" goes for the second choice and although I may have spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out what else could make up for the fact that the villain was already exposed, I must say the final surprise didn't quite do the trick. Richard Gere may still have his charm, but I'm not sure he was the best choice for the character he played. There are some action involved, but in the end this movie feels like a meal that doesn't taste as good as it looks.

The plot of this movie has room for a decent spy thriller, but it fell short. Uninspired acting and a script not worthy of inspiration leaves the characters flat and unrelatable. The two leads spend very little time actually on screen together, and there is no chemistry when they are. At one point, some information comes to light which seems like a game changer, but it is quickly swept under the rug and ignored, as it has no impact on what happens next, while it could have been actually interesting. In the end, you won't care about the characters at all, and so anything that happens won't interest you. I advise you to look elsewhere and to not come back.

for a lower budget, almost straight to DVD movie i can't really complain. I avoid a lot of straight to DVD titles, but with richard and topher on the cover at my local redbox, i thought i would give it a chance. The movie is actually put together pretty well, and looks like it could have been released in theaters fully. about 1/4 through the movie, i couldn't believe they would give the story away, but surprisingly there are a few twists that i completely did not see coming. The cast was pretty good, and the acting was not bad at all. I definitely recommend this movie if you need to kill 90 mins Story - 7.5 Acting -8 look and feel of the movie - 7.5-8 Ending - 7.5-8

"The Double," is a taut spy-thriller with echoes of the Cold War and "The Day of the Jackal." It's not easy to speak about the plot without pooping the film's surprises but let's just say that everything's different from what it appears and no one is who he seems to be (that's where the film's title comes from). I've read reviews describing the film as confusing and too complicated but in my opinion these comments are ungenerous. "The Double" shows an instantaneous reassessment of what the viewer has seen. In that sense there's a mind-twisting satisfaction in the plot. Gere is great as an entertainingly minimal actor but he's always very convincing. Here he gives weariness to a character who had seen and done too much. "The Double" is one of those dark stories where every turn seems to be a turn for the worse. To sum up it's definitely worth a look.

This is, at times, a very confusing movie. It can be forgiven for that - because clearly it's intended to be. The opening scenes of the movie (a group of illegal immigrants apparently attempting to cross into the US from Mexico) are a bit disorienting. They don't seem to fit with what you expect the movie to be about (I even questioned briefly to myself whether the video store had accidentally packed the wrong movie into the case!) Once it gets going, though, it's compelling.

Basically, the story revolves around the search for the person who assassinated a US Senator, with the prime suspect being a Soviet agent who everyone believed had been killed years before. So - yes - it was an interesting way of bringing back a sort of Cold War theme to a movie made more than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are two experts on this Russian agent known as Cassius: CIA agent Shepherdson (Richard Gere) and FBI agent Geary (Topher Grace). They get put together as a team to try to piece the puzzle together. The first twist to the story comes about a half hour through the movie, which leaves you wondering a bit what the point of the movie is, but there's a later twist that was (to me, at least) unexpected. It's pretty well done. Gere and Grace worked pretty well together. I haven't really seen much of Topher Grace since he was the star of "That 70's Show." He's matured a great deal as an actor.

There are some pretty good action scenes in this, but to its credit the movie doesn't go overboard on action. It tends to focus mostly on the relationship between Shepherdson and Geary. It's a pretty decent effort. (7/10)