ANOTHER movie means another fresh Broome for Nicole Kidman.

Like Meryl Streep and fellow Australian Cate Blanchett, she collects accents like acting honours of pride, and this time she is southern African, although the accent is about as reserved as the character she plays in Sydney Pollack's thriller of international affairs and human rights.

Kidman is Silvia Broome, a young, unattached woman who works as an African translator at the United Nations building in New York.

She is somewhat mysterious, liking to keep her flute by her side and not strong on eye contact, and there is something of the ghost about her. When the building is evacuated, she stays behind unnoticed and overhears a conversation of sinister portent in her native Ku tongue on the microphone system.

She learns that Edward Zuwanie, the despotic president of her African homeland, the fictitious Matobo, is to be the subject of an assassination plot on his arrival in New York to address the UN.

This is information that she should surely pass on immediately, but ice-maiden Silvia is a complex creature: her parents and sister were killed by Zuwanie; her brother (North Yorkshire actor Hugo Speer) is missing, and Silvia was up to her neck in radical, activist politics before she took flight to America.

Once she does talk, Secret Service special agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) sticks to her like glue, not believing her story, and watching her with gnarled intensity from the building opposite as she is afforded 24-hour protection. She is elusive, not only prone to disappearing on her moped but declining to reveal the truth behind her movements, not least her pursuit of exiled Matoban dissident Kuman-Kuman (George Harris).

Director Pollack takes a worthy, if typically clichd American stance on international politics, in his less than subtle riff on the post-colonial presidency of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and he capitalises on his unprecedented access to the UN building by going through his repertoire of Hitchcock thriller moves. However, too few scenes have the disorientating impact of the multitude of languages heard cutting across each other in the movie's early frames, and the thriller's progress is convoluted, even baffling.

While all around is conducted at a helter-skelter pace, the relationship between Kidman and Penn is more melancholic but never tantalising. Pollack does his best to stir up some potentially romantic interplay between Broome and Penn's equally guarded Keller, whose wife died only two weeks earlier in a car accident, but Kidman has played her uptight, secretive type before and is more glacial than ever, and Penn's good guy is a novelty without conviction.

Updated: 16:13 Thursday, April 14, 2005