| Movie DescriptionThe film opens five years earlier than the present, showing the Fourth of July celebration at the American consulate in Dubai, where Ray Koval (Clive Owen), an MI6 agent, appears to seduce Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts), unknowingly to him a CIA agent. Claire manages to drug Ray and steals classified documents from him.
The scene cuts to Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson), the CEO of Burkett & Randle, and Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti), the CEO of Equikrom, illustrating the rivalry between the two consumer product corporations when they get into a brawl upon encountering each other on the tarmac.
In the present day, Ray is a corporate spy in New York City who goes to work for Equikrom; at a meet, he spots Claire, thinking the mission is blown. When Ray follows her and confronts her finally for the incident in Dubai, Claire persistently puts up an innocent act, pretending she has never met Ray, until they both realize they were supposed to meet. Claire has been undercover as a counter-intelligence officer at Burkett & Randle for the past 14 months, and Ray is to become her new handler.
At Burkett & Randle, a major development is underfoot, and Tully makes a speech that paints them as innovators defending themselves from duplicity and theft. At Equikrom, Dick Garsik manages to get a copy of the speech through Claire, scoffs at the company that purchased a dump to go through their garbage, and plots to steal whatever Burkett & Randle have developed.
The scene cuts to two years earlier in Rome, where we see Ray and Claire actually meeting for the first time since Dubai as well as Claire's exact same innocent act as before. It is revealed Ray and Claire did not meet at Equikrom by chance; they plan to wait for the perfect opportunity to cheat both companies and sell a corporate secret to the highest bidder for themselves. It's clear, however, neither still completely trusts the other, and suspicion abounds as to who is playing whom.
The team at Equikrom believes Ronny Partiz (Christopher Denham), a child prodigy turned genius, might be responsible for Burkett & Randle's new product. Ray and Boris Fetyov (Oleg Stefan) stake out Partiz at a casino in the Bahamas, when Claire and Jeff Bauer (Thomas McCarthy) from Burkett & Randle foil their plans by planting evidence of them cheating the casino.
In return, Howard Tully at Burkett & Randle thanks Claire for successfully defending the company's new product, revealing it to be the cure for baldness. When Jeff Bauer is later caught attempting to steal the formula and she is left guarding him and the formula alone, Claire manages to use one of the rigged photocopiers at Burkett & Randle to transfer it to Equikrom.
Back at Equikrom, Claire accuses Ray of stealing the formula for himself, and he is searched and exposed when it is found. Claire waits at the Zürich airport in Switzerland, and when Ray arrives, it is revealed that that Claire and Ray were only putting on an act at Equikrom. Each pretends at first that they don't have the formula, and then Claire confesses she loves Ray, and says they are each the only one who can ever understand the other. Claire proposes that they each reveal what they have on the count of three, but Ray reveals that he loves Claire back, by simply revealing first that he had another copy of the formula. Claire reveals that she had it too, creating real trust for the first time.
Ray and Claire attempt to sell the formula to a Swiss company for $35 million; meanwhile Dick Garsik is revealing to his shareholders that they are in the final stages of testing for a product that cures baldness. The Swiss, however, reveal the formula is a fraud. The scene cuts to ten days earlier, where it is revealed that as Claire and Ray were practicing the act they would present when it was revealed that Ray would be Claire's handler, there was a hidden microphone in their room monitoring them. It is revealed that right from the beginning of their operation, Claire and Ray were being played by Howard Tully and his people. We see Pam Frailes (Kathleen Chalfant) from Equikrom was really working for Burkett & Randle all along, Ronny Partiz was simply used as the bait, Jeff Bauer staged stealing the formula, and thus that the formula never existed at all. It was all a trick to get Garsick to announce that he had a revolutionary product, which was in fact just a regular skin cream, and which would ruin Garsick and Equikrom. The film ends with Ray and Claire, as well as Garsik at the end of his shareholders' meeting, realizing they have all been played by Howard Tully. |
