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The International Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for some sequences of violence and language) Genre: Drama, Thriller Theater release: February 13, 2009 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Tom Tykwer Runtime: 1 hour 58 minutes Cast: Clive Owen (Louis Salinger), Naomi Watts (Eleanor Whitman), Brian F. O'Byrne (The Consultant), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Wilhelm Wexler), Ulrich Thomsen (Jonas Skarssen) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Move over, Darth Vader. Get out of the way, Hannibal Lecter. Step aside, Joker. There's a new villain in town: the evil bank. Timing is everything, and whether through luck or prescience, The International capitalizes on employing bad guys squarely in the crosshairs of American fury and bitterness. But this seemingly surefire recipe for box-office success is squandered on a thriller that, quite simply, forgets to be thrilling.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) has been on the trail of a corrupt bank for years. The former Scotland Yard investigator is now pushing pencils for Interpol but his mission remains the same—take down the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC), which he is convinced is involved in arms trading and massive money laundering for organized crime. Disheveled and on the edge, Salinger has made IBBC's demise his passion, to the exclusion of family, relationships, and even personal hygiene. Yet every time Salinger gets close to breaking the case, his witnesses end up dead, victims of convenient freak accidents.

Clive Owen as Louis Salinger

Joining him in his quest—for reasons not convincingly spelled out—is New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts). Together they follow the money trail from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul. IBBC has its tentacles in every country's government, allowing it to easily control the mechanisms of power that will legitimate its actions. When that doesn't work, hit men (including Brian F. O'Byrne) are tasked with eliminating anyone who gets in the bank's way, from turncoats in the organization to presumptive heads of state. As it turns out, IBBC more than just finances the world's war machines: "They don't want to control the conflict," one character states. "They want to control the debt that comes after the conflict." Soon IBBC will own the world.

The closer Salinger and Whitman get to uncovering the truth, the more danger they find themselves in. And if they want to take down the IBBC, they are going to have to go outside the traditional avenues of justice to do it. To do good, they'll have to get their hands very dirty.

Naomi Watts as Eleanor Whitman

The International is the worst kind of thriller. It spends two hours making you think you're watching an elaborate, multi-layered story only to be exposed, in the end, as transparent and straightforward. Worse, The International doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. For most of its leaden 118 minutes, it is a suspense thriller. But nearly an hour and a half into its running time, the film tries its hand at being an action film. It succeeds as neither—the thriller is nearly devoid of suspense and the action is too little too late. You can be Michael Clayton or you can be The Bourne Ultimatum, but apparently you cannot be both.

The razzle-dazzle showpiece of the film takes place at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum. After treating us to a lecture on the necessity for complete discretion, IBBC sends a small army of Uzi-wielding assassins to kill Salinger in broad daylight in the (conveniently sparsely populated) museum. Very subtle indeed. Fifteen minutes later, the landmark's spiral rotunda and the art installations that surround it are converted into Swiss cheese. The explosive scene doesn't entirely work, but it does give the film a much-needed jumpstart to carry it through to its unsatisfying and crude denouement.

Some may appreciate The International's "how the world really works" premise, but the film, which was made before America's current economic crisis began, is unable to capitalize on the zeitgeist. True, the debonair, haughty European bankers make for an easy and opportune target, but the now exposed ineptitude of the true-life characters may undermine the film's premise of an unstoppable bank pulling political puppet strings.

Louis and Wilhelm (Armin Mueller-Stahl) have a little talk

Others will simply be turned off by the movie's muddled plot, tepid pacing, and ambiguous, unlikely third act. After two hours of telling us the IBBC is too monolithic, pervasive, and all-powerful to stop, The International expects us to believe that one crusading vigilante and the loss of a single client would be their undoing. The script was penned by a first-time screenwriter and it shows.

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