The International a Bad Investment
For over two years, dogged Interpol Agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and upright New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) have used all of their resources to bring down a multinational banking institution they feel is supporting the world’s most horrific scum. The problem is, every time they think they’re close to cracking things wide open their leads have a tendency to show up dead, a bloody trail of bodies the only consistent deposit either of them has access to in this urgent quest for the truth.
Naomi Watts and Clive Owen in Sony Pictures' The International
The less you know about The International going in to it the better. The problem is, even if you know nothing at all about the intricacies of the plot or the minute details behind its dizzying mysteries it is still highly doubtful you’re going to walk out of the theater satisfied. While ambitious, tastefully refined, nicely acted by its veteran cast and delicately directed by esteemed auteur Tom Tykwer (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Run Lola Run) the film itself is frustratingly dumb, screenwriter Eric Warren Singer making an absolutely infuriating debut that almost makes me hope he never gets the opportunity to work in Hollywood ever again.
That’s not fair. In theory, this movie should knock a person’s socks clean off. Its labyrinthine layers call to mind some of the best political – and in some cases criminally overlooked – thrillers of the 1960’s and 70’s. There are hints of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor all over this thing, Singer crafting a continually intriguing set of circumstances that had me more often than not wondering which way the worm was going to turn next.
The problem is the destination is a bit of a pompous disaster. Not only that, it takes forever to get there. This movie tends to speak in paragraphs when short declarative statements would do, and what sounded nice on the page tends to play like melodramatic overkill when stated in hushed monotones up on the silver screen.
Worse than that, for every good idea there are two are three insipid ones that make one want to beat their head up against the door. Cops don’t shoot their own guns at fleeing suspects, instead they hand them to relative strangers for virtually no reason at all. Police Chief’s have the ability to cover up political assassinations with the enunciation of an expletive, yet they can’t control their own people well enough to stop a blood-covered suspect from walking out of a packed station house seemingly unnoticed.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest kicker is a climax with all the visceral punch of a feather tickling your nose, things getting so silly and so implausible a person would be forgiven for breaking out into fits of unceasing laughter thinking it’s all a great big joke. It’s silly stuff, and if it weren’t all so disappointing I might have been willing to let some of it slide just because it’s all so eye-rolling in its implausibility.
Yet even with this being said watching The International is hardly without its delights. Owen is as steely and as magnetic and actor as they come and he’s just made for roles like this one. He rolls through the picture like a steam train looking to burn extra coal, the rest of the talented cast (including Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ulrich Thomsen and James Rebhorn) nothing more than wide-eyed spectators taking in his mesmeric resilience.
Tykwer also stages some outstanding visual extravaganzas that certainly get the pulse pounding, a shoot-out inside the Guggenheim Museum (actually shot there) one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. Mix in Frank Griebe’s typically sensational camerawork, a musical score (composed by the director, Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek) that’s magentically sublime and editing by crackerjack cutter Mathilde Bonnefoy that masks many of the pictures more obnoxious inconsistencies and there’s plenty to adore, just not enough to warrant buying a ticket.
By the time it was over I admit to feeling cheated. I liked just enough of the movie that I wanted it to overcome its shortcomings and leave me with a satisfied grin at the conclusion of the penultimate act. This does not happen. Instead, all the film did was leave me exasperated and irritated, and if The International were a real bank the government wouldn’t have given it a single bailout dollar, letting it wither and die like the nauseatingly bad investment it ends up being.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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