Oscar winners make average thriller

"The Interpreter" was a really cool idea. A young interpreter at the United Nations overhears an assassination plot late one night. Madness ensues. Of course, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the gist. Unfortunately, that really cool idea turned out to be little more than a really cool idea. The movie that resulted turned out to be a little less than really cool. \nIt's not terrible. There are truly terrible movies (how else can you explain Tara Reid's career?), but "The Interpreter" isn't one of them. To be fair, it had a pretty highfalutin pedigree to live up to: starring Oscar-winners Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, directed by Sydney Pollack, advertised by a "whoa, cool!" trailer and filmed at the United Nations, no less. It's a lot to ask any movie to live up to. \nThe problem is that there is no single character to grasp. Silvia Broome, Kidman's character, and Tobin Keller, Penn's character, are both seriously cool. Broome is a chilly translator, born and raised in South Africa and Sorbonne-educated. Penn is a wounded Secret Service agent whose wife just died. They're fabulous as character sketches, and would've been fascinating as secondary characters. But even as the not-so-bad plot unfolded, I just didn't really care too much about them. Even in the most intense of action flicks, a somewhat sympathetic main character is crucial. Broome and Keller's character-developing events are either totally foreign to normal experience or revealed too late to factor into the audience's perception of them. \nAt first, I thought I may be really into Silvia Broome. Kidman looks good looking bad for most of the film: rail thin, stringy hair and battered face. She's intelligent, tough in a fragile way and attractively tortured. But I wasn't sure she was on my side. Kidman was great in the part, undoubtedly, but it never gelled. \nAnd Tobin Keller was even more problematic. Maybe the problem was that the last two films I saw Sean Penn in were "Mystic River" and "21 Grams." Both were fabulous. Both forced the viewer to fall in love, just a little, with Penn as he breaks down. But in "The Interpreter," we don't find out until a third of the way in that Keller is so guarded because of his wife's recent death. We find out even later the circumstances. Penn is good in "The Interpreter," but the audience connection scene must have been left on the cutting room floor.\nSeeing the United Nations will be pretty nifty for the CNN junkies, but I had to mourn that the United Nations decided to open up for this specific movie. They wouldn't let Hitchcock for "North by Northwest" but they would for "The Interpreter"? Goofed that one up didn't you, United Nations?\nSo my recommendation? Catch it on video. It's cool, and it has it's good points. It's just simply not worth the price of a movie ticket.