With Heaven, director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) directs the final script of Polish writer-director Krzyzstof Kieslowski and comes up with a combination of their contrasting styles that somehow manage to work well together.

Cate Blanchett stars as Phillipa Paccard, an English amateur terrorist living in Italy whose one attempt at assassination goes horribly wrong. She meant to kill the local drug kingpin with a bomb in his trashcan. He had been selling to school kids and was responsible for the death of her husband.

Instead she inadvertently became responsible for the deaths of four innocents--a cleaning woman (who naively emptied the wastebasket) and a father and his two daughters--when the elevator they were riding in was blown off the building by the bomb.

Since she is already in trouble for the crime, she sets out to complete her original task. A local policeman, Fillipo (Giovanni Ribisi), who has a school-age brother, decides to risk his job and life in order to assist her in her attempt on the kingpin's life.

Kieslowski's screenplay uses the masculine and feminine counterparts of the name "Phillip," letting us know from the beginning (in cinema language) that these two are inextricably intertwined, two halves of the same whole. As the film progresses, they slowly take on each other's appearance in their styles of dress and hair.

Heaven is probably not a film for fans of Tykwer's frenetic Run Lola Run, as its slow--almost hypnotic--pacing contrasts greatly with Lola's. But for those willing to take the risk, Heaven is very rewarding. It is wonderful to see Blanchett and Ribisi together again after previously displaying their terrific chemistry in The Gift, another great film. Their performances alone are worth the viewing, but even so the setup at the beginning of the film pays off beautifully at the perfect, if inevitable, ending.