Welcome to The International. Please sit forward and don’t relax. You will be, as one character puts it, “more comfortable tense.” Clive Owen stars as a bedraggled Interpol agent who, along with Naomi Watts as a more kempt but less interesting New York City assistant district attorney, plays a globetrotting game of cat-and-mouse with an all-powerful, deeply nefarious multinational bank.
And I mean deeply nefarious. Under the detail-minding stewardship of one seriously chilly chief executive Euro-scoundrel (Ulrich Thomsen), this is an institution whose action plan for long-term growth consists of trading up from laundering mob money to stoking third-world arms races in order to collect perpetual debt from the racers.
Owen’s investigator used to work for Scotland Yard, where he tried to turn the heat up on this bank once before. But that backfired, somewhat mysteriously, and cost him his job. He shouldn’t have taken it personally, though; you’re not really on The International Bank of Business and Credit’s shit list until multiple assassins are hired to kill the multiple assassins who’ve been hired to kill you.
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Clive Owen mugs through the money mysteries at the heart of The International. We couldn’t ask for more. |
Because it has a nostalgic whiff of ’70s-style man-against-malevolent-system thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and The Parallax View, there is reason to worry, early on, that The International will be plenty handsome and classy and grown up but also derivative and actually kind of boring. We have seen this kind of thing on the home front recently enough, usually with George Clooney in the driver’s seat of what amounts to a Cadillac CTS sedan of a movie: impressive to a few of the neighbors, maybe, but not the ones who drive BMWs.
Which is only to say that Bavarian engineering does make a difference. German director Tom Tykwer, most famous for Run Lola Run, has a knack for arty suspense and for moving through cities—in this case, the commerce centers of Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, and the United States—with brisk intensity. Here, that vitality culminates in an assuredly choreographed if subtlety-chucking climactic shootout in New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, by turns thrilling, astonishing, ridiculous, then thrilling again, then sort of confusing, then a little disgusting, then exhausting, and finally very sobering.
Now, perhaps all this business of banking-industry bad guys sounds like a trumped-up reach for topicality. But as screenwriter Eric Warren Singer understands (better, unfortunately, than he understands how to make Watts’ character compelling), there is an older and even more direct precedent for such financial devilry, in the case of the multi-billion-dollar Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which succumbed to global scandals in 1991. Certain sorts of corruption, like certain sorts of movies, are timeless.
The International also has the advantage of fine, genre-savvy supporting performances from Brian F. O’Byrne and Armin Mueller-Stahl among its villains, an appealing sheen of gloom from cinematographer Frank Griebe, and aptly shivery incidental music by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. Maybe it’s not the ultimate driving machine, as thrillers go, but it is designed to perform. Do buckle up.
