Kick-Back Friday: #182
Suffice it to say that the Hitchcockian thriller Anthony Zimmer (2005) works where its American remake, The Tourist (2010), does not, because the story's essential Everyman—you know, the pedestrian guy caught up in extraordinary circumstances—is played by a passably attractive, unknown* actor and not Johnny Depp—who can never be an Everyman. The former movie, a French product, also prevails because of some unexplainable tolerance we, as American viewers, have for unbelievable premises in foreign films—which we would otherwise laugh at in Hollywood vehicles. Or maybe, in the case of Anthony Zimmer versus The Tourist, the actors, or the execution, or just all of it is simply better in the former picture.
* That is, unknown to most American viewers. The Everyman actor in Anthony Zimmer, Yvan Attal, also has this curious right
