Cosmopolis - movie review

Release date: 15 June 2012
Certificate: 15
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti

What's the story?
A rich young businessman (Pattinson) decides to visit a barber shop on the other side of town. As he travels across Manhattan, various people join him in his stretch limo.

What did we think?
If Robert Pattinson's intention is to distance himself from the Twilight film franchise, joining forces with Canadian provocateur Cronenberg is a good way to start. When it is not being strange and esoteric, though, Cosmopolis is just plain dull and is saddled with a protagonist who's impossible to connect with.

A fortnight ago, Charlize Theron had two movies - Prometheus and Snow White and the Huntsman - out the same week. Now it's the turn of Paul Giamatti to be curiously ubiquitous, a quirk of scheduling seeing his comic turn in Rock of Ages coincide with his altogether darker cameo in David Cronenberg's latest.

The Sideways man, though, is just one of several familiar faces Robert Pattinson runs into over the course of a peculiar psychodrama whose luxury limousine setting adds a new meaning to the phrase 'star vehicle'.

With Juliette Binoche as a sexually accommodating art dealer, Samantha Morton as a financial analyst and Mathieu Amalric as a pie-throwing prankster, there is no telling whom the Twilight actor will encounter next in his role as an obscenely wealthy Wall Street speculator used to viewing the world through his chariot's tinted windows.

The more individuals RPatz invites into his chauffeur-driven sanctuary, however, the more it becomes clear that Cosmopolis has nowhere interesting to go and plans to get there very slowly. It doesn't help that its lead is playing an emotionally distant blank whose bored, disengaged demeanour seldom offers us anything to like. Stylish, yes, and Pattinson does well with what he's given. But it never really lands at anything meaningful or memorable.

Verdict: Breaking Yawn.