"It's kinduva damsel in distress thing," a beret-clad Wahlberg tells a French flic probing his fledgling friendship with recently widowed Thandie Newton.

And he's not joking. The mysterious husband of Regina (Newton) met an untimely end after being pushed out of a train - just when she was about to divorce him.

Returning from Martinique, where she first ran into Joshua (Wahlberg), Regina discovers the news about her art dealer spouse and her Parisian flat ransacked.

So who turns up when he is needed most - none other than the enigmatic Joshua...but she's also the subject of attention from a trio of nasty looking hoods.

And just to keep everyone on their toes up pops Robbins as a spook for a shady US government department that wants to know exactly what's going on.

It appears the dead Charles Lambert (Dillane) was not precisely who he says he was and has got a fistful of different passports to prove it.

He also knew the whereabouts of a $6m-worth of merchandise...and everyone wants to get their mits on it.

Demme's light touch which served him so well with the likes of Something Wild and Married to the Mob appears to have deserted him here.

This is supposed to be based on 1963's Charade but Wahlberg is no Cary Grant and Newton not within a whisker of Audrey Hepburn.

What strives to be carefree emerges as laboured and a plot that has pretensions to complexity just turns out confused.

Newton seems to have put all her effort into mastering an English accent leaving her with all the dramatic impact of a half-hearted Bond girl.

Without a role which calls for him to flex his torso, Wahlberg seems a little bit lost especially in a city where he's called up on to speak French.

"You're not going to London," he tells a fleeing Regina and he's not wrong - she's just boarded an intercity TGV train and not a Waterloo-bound Eurostar.

"I do seem to be caught up in a terrible mess," she breathlessly announces at one stage. She's not the only one.

Tim Evans