Take equal parts "The Sting" and "The Thomas Crown Affair," stir in a dollop of star power and the juice of several tangy supporting performances and -- voila! -- it's the "Duplicity" cocktail, a fizzy concoction that tickles your nose without doing any serious damage to your faculties.

Writer/director Tony Gilroy's follow-up to the excellent "Michael Clayton" is a lightweight caper featuring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen as spies who click in bed but absolutely distrust each other under other circumstances.

At the film's outset two spies, Brit Ray Koval (Owen) and the CIA's Claire Stenwick (Roberts) meet cute at an American Embassy function in the Middle East, exchange sexy pleasantries and then fall into bed. Ray awakens a half day later to an empty room, a tranquilizer headache and the realization that Claire has drugged him and made off with a cache of secret codes he was supposed to deliver to his bosses.

Years later Ray and Claire find themselves working on the same team. As corporate spies they're up to their necks in industrial espionage, waging a war between two mega-corporations specializing in personal care products.

The CEOs -- played by Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti -- are enemies, so much so that in the movie's title sequence we see these middle-aged captains of industry ineffectually brawling in slow motion.

Ray has been hired by one company to sleuth out the competition's revolutionary secret product. Claire works in counterintelligence for the other guys, but in reality she's a double agent on Ray's team, working deep undercover to get that information from the inside.

Or is she? It's just about impossible to figure out who's playing whom.

Gilroy's screenplay alternates between the present and flashbacks showing Ray and Claire's love/hate relationship over the years. The dialogue is heavy on mind games -- neither lover is able to take what the other says at face value, and neither can those of us in the audience. Are they sincere? Working a con on their loved one?

At times, "Duplicity" is too convoluted and knotted for easy comprehension; even the savviest viewer will experience some serious confusion. But Gilroy does deliver a last-act "gotcha!" that virtually no one will see coming.

Wilkinson is his usual great self as a sort of zen-warrior industrialist; Giamatti is his polar opposite as a self-serving, media-milking CEO. In an itty-bitty role, character actress Carrie Preston, as a corporate travel agent who falls for one of Ray's romantic scams, steals the movie from her high-pay castmates.

Most problematical is the chill that settles where the movie's erotic heart should be pounding away. Roberts and Owen talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. For all their tease-me-please-me exchanges, "Duplicity" isn't particularly sexy. And it needs to be for this enterprise to hit all the right notes.

2 .5 stars out of five

'DUPLICITY'

STARRING: Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti

DIRECTOR: Tony Gilroy

RATED: PG-13 for language and some sexual content.

Other movies on sex and spying

Here is a sampling of this enticing combination (and practically required of every James Bond movie):

"Notorious" (1946): In this Hitchcock classic, beautiful Ingrid Bergman goes deep undercover as the wife of a Nazi spy (Claude Rains) but all the while loves her brusque American handler (Cary Grant).

"From Russia With Love" (1963): 007 (Sean Connery) wins over Soviet spy (Daniela Bianchi) with his bedroom technique. But he doesn't know it's all being filmed through a two-way mirror.

"The Spy Who Loved Me" (1977): Bond (Roger Moore) investigates the hijacking of nuclear warheads with the help of KGB agent Barbara Bach, whose lover he killed. But she's a forgiving sort.

"GoldenEye" (1995): Bond (Pierce Brosnan) squares off against Russian assassin Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who uses pleasure as a weapon. What a way to go.

"Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005): Estranged married couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt end upon opposite sides of a big espionage case. Noteworthy as the film that created Brangelina.