The Truth about Charlie

REVIEW
For no apparent reason, director Demme has updated the nimbly comic caper Charade, one of the livelier Hitchcock knockoffs of the ’60s. Newton steps into Audrey Hepburn’s classy heels as a continental waif who returns to Paris to discover her new husband has been murdered. A trio of thugs wants dead hubby’s stolen loot and they think she’s got it. Wahlberg inherits the Cary Grant role as a shady smoothie who offers assistance but who might be just as crooked as the goons. Newton is appropriately bubbly and ditzy but Wahlberg is, to put it mildly, embarrassingly ineffectual and devoid of charm; that the mysterious character he portrays is strengthened by the shakiness of the performer’s feeble acting skills is a scant compliment. Worse, he and Newton generate zero chemistry. Stylistically, Demme is paying tribute to the films of the French New Wave — epileptic jump cutting; Tak Fujimoto’s whiplash widescreen photography, some of which was inexplicably shot on murky digital video — but, combined with the film’s maddeningly labyrinthine plot twists, the result is enough to pummel anyone into a dizzying stupor. Most unforgivably, the Parisian landscape is criminally underutilized. Great soundtrack, though.