Review: 'The Burnt Orange Heresy' is a slow-burn heist movie that doesn't use star Elizabeth Debicki at all well

Though “The Burnt Orange Heresy” is a thriller about stealing art, don’t expect some fast-paced thriller like “The Thomas Crown Affair” or one of the “Ocean’s” trilogy. 

The fuse burns slowly here in this adaptation of a novel by the late Charles Willeford (“Miami Blues”), with enough time for an examination of what’s art and what’s fakery.

Claes Bang, the Danish actor who starred in the art-gallery drama “The Square,” here plays James Figueras, an American art critic in Italy who makes his meager living through lectures to art tourists. He used to be a big wheel, as art critics go, and the billionaire Joseph Cassidy (played by Mick Jagger), knows it.

Cassidy, a man of wealth and taste (to borrow one of Jagger’s lyrics), invites James to his mansion on Lake Como with a proposition. Cassidy has a reclusive artist, Jerome Debney, living on his property. Debney hasn’t exhibited a new work in decades — ever since the fire that destroyed his Paris studio, after which Debney left behind an empty frame on a wall, an enigmatic promise of what was or might have been there. Cassidy’s offer to James is a chance to interview Debney, if James can snatch one of Debney’s current paintings for Cassidy’s collection.

James, by the way, has been accompanied to Lake Como by Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), a schoolteacher from Duluth who came to Italy for a little adventure — and finding it by jumping into bed with the charming art critic. When James meets Debney, the artist has no interest in subjecting himself to the writer’s interrogation, but he does invite both James and Berenice to dinner and a visit to his studio to see what he’s working on these days.

Director Giuseppe Capotondi and screenwriter Scott B. Smith have taken us pretty far down the road by this point, and one more step would be spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that some things aren’t what they seem, while some people turn out to be exactly who they appear to be — and the sneaky delights in this movie are in discovering which is which.

Bang is good as the scheming critic, desperate to use Debney’s mystique to restart his career. Jagger and Sutherland exude charm in their small roles. The disappointment here is how poorly the movie handles Debicki, who is so ferociously good in “Widows” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” but is squandered in a role that teases us with more than she ultimately gets to do. Wasting a talent like Debicki may be the biggest heresy of all.

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‘The Burnt Orange Heresy’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 7, at Megaplex Theatres across Utah. Rated R for some sexual content/nudity, language, drug use and violence. Running time: 100 minutes.