Four years ago, German director (and owner of the coolest name in all of cinema) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck directed his first feature — a complex, smart, completely engrossing examination of cultural repression and spying in Cold War-era East Germany. That film, The Lives of Others, skyrocketed von Donnersmarck into the arthouse spotlight, earning the director enough accolades and awards to require a mantle as long as his name to hold them all. He went to Hollywood to try to land a high-profile project to lift his star even higher, and ended up stuck with everyone else’s leftover: a remake of a French romantic thriller that had already been dumped mid-development by two other directors and at least three stars.

But with von Donnersmarck at the helm instead of Lasse Hallström, the new director making his own pass at script rewrites and Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie taking the place of the likes of Tom Cruise, Sam Worthington and Charlize Theron, one might think that the producers had traded up. In reality, it’s difficult to imagine the result being any worse than it already is, no matter who else was behind or in front of the camera.

How bad is The Tourist? I’ll put it this way: the woman sitting next to me in the theater was engaging in a mundane and rudely loud running commentary on Jolie’s wardrobe throughout the first half of the picture. When she finally stopped talking, I realized she’d actually been more entertaining than what I was seeing on the screen.