"This man is a tourist!" – Elise

The Tourist should have been a raging success. A sumptuous $100m Hitchcockian thriller, set in the most impossibly scenic slivers of Europe, starring two of the most intimidatingly beautiful people alive. A script by Christopher McQuarrie from The Usual Suspects and Julian Fellowes from Downton Abbey. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who won an Oscar for The Lives of Others, in the director's chair. What could have possibly gone wrong?

A lot, it turns out. Although blame has been assigned to everything from a constant churn of writers, directors and stars to the incredibly short production turnaround, the fact is that The Tourist is a colossal hodgepodge of wasted opportunity. Or at least it seemed that way back in 2010. Has it improved with age?

"Why is everyone trying to kill me?" – Frank

Nope. At first glance, the main problem with The Tourist is that everyone seems to be starring in a completely different film. Jolie treats the entire thing like a big-budget, gussied-up, Vaseline-lensed perfume ad; her vainglorious attempt at Nicole Kidman's "I'm a dancer! I love to dance!" Chanel commercial. Johnny Depp, meanwhile, has two approaches. Perhaps it's all those years of desperate contortion to make the tortured Pirates of the Caribbean dialogue seem in any way humorous, but he plays everything for laughs here. His other approach, the more immediate one, is to try and get through the entire film without ever actually opening his mouth. And then there's Steven Berkoff who, because he's Steven Berkoff, mistakes his character for a screaming lunatic trapped at the bottom of a well.

The worst crime of all, though, is the comprehensive lack of chemistry between Depp and Jolie. After all, her entire mission ostensibly involves finding a stranger and unleashing the full force of her sexual charisma upon him until he's powerless to resist. Their first meeting on a train had the potential to be immediately iconic, bristling with tension and longing. In truth, though, it's barely even a Gold Blend advert. Jolie's seductive gaze is so hamfisted that it makes her look like a little old lady struggling to read a menu through cataracts. Depp's first instinct, obviously, is to respond to this bloodless come-on by giving a blank-eyed yet surprisingly comprehensive explanation of how e-cigarettes work. And this is just about as sexy as the film gets. After that, the whole thing descends into tedious cinematic anti-Viagra. It's an enormous disappointment.

"You're ravenous" – Frank

So that's the beginning of the film. The middle of the film is equal parts European scenery, mumbling and Angelina Jolie attempting to liven things up by playing a sort of Buckaroo game where she sees how much makeup and jewellery she can load on to her face without her head popping off. And then, gloriously, the film is rounded out by a twist so aggressively dimwitted that you'd get up and kick your television over if the preceding 92 minutes hadn't entirely sapped you of your will to live.

If this is your first time watching The Tourist, I'm totally about to spoil the ending for you. But then again you've read this far and still want to watch it, so you've got it coming. At the end it's revealed that Johnny Depp's character isn't a schlubby community-college teacher after all. He's actually Alexander Pearce, a man wanted by the police for an overdue payment of hundreds of millions of pounds in taxes. He also used to go out with Angelina Jolie. But he had plastic surgery, so she didn't recognise him. But she recognised him enough to pick him out of an entire carriage of strangers. If that was the point of his surgery. It might not have been. This film is so stupid.

Also, at the end of this pointless and unnecessarily long nearly-caper – the one that takes place across two countries and involves mistaken identity and expensive hotels and torture and death and enough lens-Vaseline to lubricate an entire tectonic plate – Johnny Depp just writes the police a cheque for his unpaid taxes. He went through all that, when he could have just written a cheque at the start of the film and saved everyone a lot of wasted time that they're never going to get back. Johnny Depp is an idiot.

Notes

• There's no way of saying how much shorter this film would be if you cut out all the scenes where Jolie and Depp gaze at each other in total dead-eyed silence. But, conservatively, let's say it'd be 15 times shorter.

• I have now watched The Tourist three times, and it's only just occurred to me that Angelina Jolie is actually doing a pretty spot-on Anne Robinson impression.

• Wait, he had plastic surgery! Maybe that's why he can't really open his mouth! It all makes sense now!