THERE'S little spring in the step of the movies around at the moment, and silly old me thought that The Interpreter was going to be the start of a better roll.

True, it's not awful, but the general air of mediocrity that surrounds it is definitely disappointing in a film directed by Sydney Pollack (The Firm and my own favourite, Tootsie) and starring the extremely talented Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn.

But even though they make an audience perhaps expect too much, the calibre of that trio is what eventually saves this movie.

Kidman has the difficult "accent" role, playing the white African interpreter Silvia Broome, who's from a fictional area of the continent called Matobo. The complexities of her part mean she has to play a girl who has been affected by the dialect of an English mother, a foreign education including the Sorbonne and a good few years living in the US.

Little wonder it's a complex voice - and, in fact, a dialect coach was brought in to create a sound especially for the film.

While working at the UN building in New York, she returns one evening to pick up some of her belongings when she hears two men whispering about an assassination plot against the Matoban dictator Zuwanie. And when her accidental discovery leads her to fear for the safety of her own life and those whom she knows are struggling back home, she decides to report the matter to the federal authorities.

Enter Penn, accompanied by the very good Catherine Keener as his tough partner.

Now Kidman may be playing a woman with a shady background, but there are few actors who look more like they've got a whole lotta past than the craggy Penn.

Of course, the plot then moves towards the revelation of their individual motivations in some very talky moments and dramatic one-on-ones.

Be warned that The Interpreter is quite a complex jigsaw, involving more than one prospective dictator and trying to present the realities of persecution and genocide without referring to anywhere real.

It achieves background authenticity with its on-location filming in New York and in the actual UN building itself. In fact, it was the first film ever to be allowed to do the latter - even Hitchcock was denied the pleasure. But it never totally achieves anything real elsewhere.

The supposedly old photographs of Silvia have Kidman so badly superimposed onto them that a chimpanzee could have done better with cut-outs of her head and some glue.

While the aims are true, we never quite buy the whole scenario.

Yes, this has charm and integrity - but if the biggest moment in your Kidman/Penn movie is a bomb on a bus, and you've bypassed their abilities while letting off a big bang, I think you've missed the point.