Overcooked Mystery Leaves Bad Taste

"The Truth About Charlie"

Thoroughly summarizing the plot of "The Truth About Charlie" would be similar to overcooking pasta -- you could still eat the pasta or see the film, but the experience would taste pretty soggy.

"The Truth About Charlie" is a mystery thriller based on the screenplay of 1963's "Charade." Fans of the Cary Grant original will find this new adaptation as disappointing as mushy spaghetti.

The disparity between the performances of stars Grant and Mark Wahlberg raises doubts that the two men stemmed from the same species.

Marky Mark hacking the sardonic, elusive air of Grant's character causes flinching on screen and off. One minute of naked chest reveals his main talent, while his supporting mental assets fit under a tight black beret he sports around Paris.

Wahlberg portrays Joshua Peters, a man whom Regina Lambert, played by Thandie Newton, meets in the Caribbean shortly before returning to Paris to find her apartment empty and her husband, the titular Charles Lambert, dead.

Twenty sharp exchanges between Regina and Peters and between Regina and French detectives later, we discover that Charles hid several million dollars on earth before he left the planet.

Everybody save Regina races after the fortune -- ex-military thugs, Peters and a Tim Robbins character representing the United States with a Kennedy Boston monotone.

Newton as Regina shows the same monetary disinterest of Audrey Hepburn in "Charade" but lacks Hepburn's ability to render the straight-man role stylish and slightly unpredictable.

Her hollow relationship with Peters resembles more Mrs. Robinson than the ingenue-as-seductress dynamic between Hepburn and Grant.

Wahlberg stumbles over his lines with little-boy awkwardness, and his muscles provide the only reasonable basis for Regina's interest.

Judging from her expression, you could replace "everything" with "nothing" as she rushes through the classic line, "You know what's wrong with you? Absolutely everything."

If the protagonists are the overdone entree, then the film's peripheral characters and technique are the buttery garlic bread and rich tiramisu that save you from starvation.

One of the militant henchmen suffers from rage and hypochondria. In one scene, surrounded by pill bottles and heat pads, he screams at Peters with acupuncture pins jutting from his temple and heart monitor sensors suctioned to his chest.

Unfortunately, the movie's intelligence only manifests itself in small elements, such as the hypochondriac. Director Jonathan Demme ("Silence of the Lambs") tries to capture the panache of the original in a contemporary context, but the uneven wit of the dialogue, protean changes of camera angle and wan shadows of classic scenes thrust his film into anachronistic limbo.

"The Truth About Charlie" yearns for '60s style in the 21st century. Rather than having produced an unbalanced picture which intimates a millennial gaucheness, its creators should have searched for a modern moxy.

The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be reached at artsdesk@unc.edu.