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by JOANNE LATIMER

A middle-aged journalist turns Rambo, seeking revenge for the murder of his wife and daughters. Again? Doesn’t that sound like every thriller from the 1970s? The Fourth Angel is remarkably old-fashioned—and boring—with a plot that comes straight from the bottom drawer of a reporter’s desk.

The Average Guy in this movie is the foreign affairs editor at The Economist. He’s taking his family on a working vacation to India, but terrorists seize their plane. His son survives, but his wife and two daughters get shot in the scuffle. The bad guys are a crack team of eastern European mercenaries with no political agenda. The police don’t have any answers and the government mysteriously releases the terrorists back to their homelands.

So, our Average Guy rises to the occasion to find the killers and seek justice. Only, the Average Guy is played by Jeremy Irons—a man so painfully civilized in his manners and bearing that it’s impossible to believe he’d take the law into his own hands. Worse yet, he drives a Vespa, wearing a leather suit that recalls Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. The best laughs are unintentional, as Irons breaks into a warehouse, cat-burglar-style, and shoots his way out of a nest of Euro-thugs. All that violence, then back to The Theatre for an alibi. Irons is supposed to be surprised by his own capacity for violence, but he actually looks annoyed that Bruce Willis isn’t on hand to save the day.

As you’d expect from a middle-aged fantasy film, Irons gets to hook-up with an old girlfriend (Charlotte Rampling), buy a boat and out-smart the cop (Forest Whitaker). I’m surprised director John Irvin didn’t give Irons’ character a new red sports car. Irvin made Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—a decent thriller—but here he seems to have lost his nerve for the unexpected. My sympathies go out to Whitaker, however, who is pressed into making bad jokes about colleagues’ sport coats. Why Irons was pressed into this action, I’ll never know. :

The Fourth Angel opens Friday, Jan. 18