Photo by Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures, Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures
Clive Owen and Naomi Watts track down the conspiratorial high rollers of high finance in "The International."
Unfortunately for us, "The International" couldn't be more timely. The empire of evil in this globetrotting thriller isn't the Mafia or SPECTRE but the banking industry, which is presented as, essentially, invulnerable to prosecution -- beyond good and evil and even the necessity of bailouts. The multinational muckety-mucks of high finance seen here aren't seeking to control the world with drugs or gambling or sex but through I.O.U.'s. Comments one observer: "This is the essence of the banking industry: to make us slaves to debt."
Photo by Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures
Clive Owen and Naomi Watts track down the conspiratorial high rollers of high finance in "The International."
Interpol Agent Louis Salinger and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman are determined to bring to justice one of the world's most powerful banks. Uncovering ...
Rating: R for some sequences of violence and language
Length: 118 minutes
Released: February 13, 2009 Nationwide
Cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brían F. O'Byrne
Director: Tom Tykwer
Writer: Eric Warren Singer
What's an Interpol agent to do when such debtmongers also traffic in murder and revolution? Clive Owen stars as maverick world law enforcement officer Louis Salinger, who is presented as if he were the next step in the post-Daniel Craig evolution of James Bond toward humorless, existential "realism." Louis is aided at times by a Manhattan assistant district attorney played, in a less than convincing bit of casting, by Naomi Watts. In fact, Watts' character could have been cut from Eric Singer's script without eliminating anything other than the possibility of a romantic subplot that never materializes.
Directed by Tom Tykwer, a smart German filmmaker who made an international splash in 1998 with "Run Lola Run," "The International" aspires to the paranoid heights of "The Parallax View" and other twisty conspiracy thrillers. Unfortunately, Tykwer seems somewhat hobbled by the commercial requirements of a big-budget production.
The action sequences -- including a tour-de-force shootout along the winding stairway of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (actually, an amazing fullscale reproduction, built on a set in Germany) -- are impressive but forced. More intriguing is Tykwer's use of actual architecture; his characters typically are dwarfed by or lost within looming towers of cold steel and glass, which says more about the apparent hopelessness of their quest for justice than any of the machinations of the plot.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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