Entertainment Ireland

Christensen, Earl Cameron, George Harris, Michael Wright. Details: US/ 122 mins/(15A).

Acting heavyweights Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman combine to relatively muted effect in Sydney Pollack's well-intentioned if uneven political thriller. Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a UN translator and displaced citizen of the embattled (fictional) African nation of Matobo. One evening, while alone in the General Assembly, she overhears a conversation - spoken in her native tongue of Ko - which indicates that the despotic president of her homeland, Zuwanie (Earl Cameron) will be assassinated when he comes to address the UN. Although she reports what she's heard, recently bereaved Secret Service agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) isn't sure that he believes her. The reason? Broome is rather judicious with the facts when it comes to her own past in her homeland, leading Keller to have his doubts regarding the validity of her claims.

Pollock's got his serious face on with The Interpreter and you don't have to be an expert on world politics to twig that Matoba bears more than a striking resemblance to events currently on-going in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Highly charged political atmospheres hark back to another era and The Interpreter feels like a thriller imported from the 1970s, eschewing kinetic action hysterics and power-play set pieces for hefty, sometimes chunky, dialogue. Yet its greatest success is also its Achilles heel, as the screenplay oscillates wildly in tone, especially in the second half. The product of several different writers, the film feels it, guilty of overplaying situations and the characters - Penn and Kidman's characters simply have too much going on with their backstories to be remotely believable - while the set pieces, when they eventually arrive, have a whiff of the predictable.

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