Brian De Palma, as ever, exhibits abundant mechanical skills and equally abundant delight in their application. It would be fruitless to wonder what kind of career he could have had if he possessed even half a brain. Here he constructs, from a script of his own, a self-conscious film noir so full of baloney that we must limit ourselves, for illustrative purposes, to a single slice. Consider, to begin with, the height of the odds that a slinky jewel thief (supermodel turned commonplace actress, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) would happen to have an exact double, unbeknownst to her, within the borders of France. And then calculate the rate of growth of those odds when the jewel thief gets thrown over a guardrail, plummets several stories through a glass ceiling, and happens to land unconscious but unharmed at the feet of her double's closest relatives, who take her straight home without a side trip to police station or hospital. It only gets worse. Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo -- and in particular its nonverbal tailing scenes, its mysterious music, its revelatory flashback, not to mention its dead-ringer motif -- is plainly a major influence, as it also was in De Palma's Sisters, Obsession, and Body Double. High time, then, to acknowledge that that hugely entertaining, slightly overrated, and severely nonsensical Hitchcock thriller has granted a lot of lesser filmmakers a carte blanche for wanton nonsense. To wit: if Vertigo is hunky-dory, and Vertigo is nonsense, then nonsense must be hunky-dory. Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Gregg Henry. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd