I imagine the pitch for “The Tourist” this way:

“You take a pretty lady – an Angelina Jolie type, say. She’s on a sexy high-end train from Paris. She meets a pretty guy -a Johnny Depp type, for example. She is mysterious to the point of incomprehensibility. He is a fish out of water. They travel to a pretty city – let’s say Venice. There’s some sort of intrigue – with gangsters and guns and rooftop chases. They lady and the guy fall in love, because they’re so pretty. And then from way left of nowhere – BAM! We drop a twist on ’em. Sailing into the sunset, and credits. Can’t miss.”

It’s not a bad pitch. The devil, however, is in the details. Where he always is.

The problem with this movie is that the story is ludicrous and profoundly inconsistent. Even things that seem to make sense as we go along are undone by the M. Night style twist in the final reel. I challenge you to harmonize the plot twist with the 80 minutes that precede it. I double-dog challenge you.

On the bright side, if you can get past the silly plotting, the inscrutable motivations of our leads and the increasingly precarious placement of Angelina’s generous head on her ever-vanishing body, the movie is pretty. All of the visual surfaces are treated with great care. Our leads are lovely people, doing picturesque things in a thoroughly charming locale. The Venice Chamber of Commerce couldn’t have asked for a lovelier postcard. It’s so nicely shot, in fact, that from time to time you forget that the actions on screen make zero sense. It’s almost worth the ticket price as a travel picture.

There is no real reason to see this movie. It’s a PG-13 thriller without a ton of thrills, a romantic comedy that isn’t especially funny or sexy. Too bad, really. Sometimes you have all the ingredients, but you just can’t turn them into something worth eating.