The Slickness
by Chris Knipp

Tom Twyker's The International is a polished thriller with what Variety calls a "pro tech package": expensive location shots; elaborate, sometimes stunning camera set-ups in Lyon, NYC, Istanbul, Milan, and Luxembourg; a shootout that trashes the Guggenheim Museum; good actors like Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl. But something's missing.

The first trouble is that Tykwer's villain is a set of initials: IBBC. We can get excited about initials if they carry some preexisting resonance, like MI5, CIA, IRA, USSR. Or barring that, if some personalities are associated with them. In this movie's eagerness to demonize the impersonality of capitalist power-madness, it neglects to endow evil with a human face. But a high energy action movie needs those. With their simple but classically effective structure, the Bond movies always have vivid baddies. You've got to. An actioner can't get very far with pure abstraction.

First-time screenwriter Eric Warren Singer showed lucky timing in choosing a story about an evil bank in this moment of financial disaster and revealed monetary malfeasance. He based his story on a bank out of Pakistan that fell after twenty years of financing money laundering, arms dealing, terrorism, and other heinous pursuits. But Singer's screenplay has too few specifics to offer, and his Interpol and US judiciary operatives' frantic campaign has nothing to do with all of us or with the world economy. IBBC's victims are Third World countries exploited and controlled not via money but debt. The human implications of IBBC's actions are never visualized. International concludes with a facile cynicism that fizzles, and the joke's on Clive Owen's worn-out hero, Louis Salinger.

Salinger's got a vague profile. He hates this evil bank. Somehow he proved a loose cannon at Scotland Yard, but got kicked upstairs to Interpol. Really he's just Clive Owen, lord of disaster, the last angry man, rumpled, unshaven, short of sleep and and pursued by a pretty, earnest blond associate, Naomi Watts, dutifully going through her paces as a NYC assistant district attorney. How the two got paired off remains a mystery. As a disgruntled intermediary for the bank, Mueller-Stahl gets an interesting little backstory; but he still remains a static figure, flavorful but moot.

Apart from the Third World debt idea, the plot stays trendy by introducing a specific international arms deal (well, as specific as Singer's writing gets) in which the same Italian firm that sells stuff to Israel is selling it to Syria and Iran. Only the Muslim customers will get duds, which will make them hopping mad.

There's that shootout in the Guggenheim, with screaming bystanders, automatic weapons, and a crashing art installation of reflective panels and gyrating videos. Opinions differ on whether this set piece is a stunner or a waste of a striking setting. Sure, it’s a stunner. But there’s the little problem of plot. The mere idea that even a super-nasty bank would be dumb enough to wipe out a blown assassin by having half a dozen shooters trash a major museum, leaving its walls full of giant pock marks, is simply ridiculous. It's so pointless, its only effect is to make you wonder how and where it was actually staged (in a mockup of the museum in Germany, apparently).

Any old-fashioned TV cop show from before The Wire was more emotionally involving than this movie. At the beginning, when a whistle blower wants to talk and the cop who meets with him is mysteriously offed, an intriguing atmosphere is established. But it's wasted from there on, because we don't get to know those evil bankers. They're just a bunch of stonewalling suits in big glass and stone buildings. And just because Clive Owen is a bit angry and doesn't sleep, that doesn't make him into any kind of hero. He's just the hero of Children of Men without global disaster or any place to go. A double-sniper assassination in Milan (à la Vantage Point), a pumped-up musical score, and high altitude tracking shots, no matter how well executed, can't compensate for the essential lack of plot or character.

Tom Tykwer's hipness has steadily melted down from Run, Lola, Run to the high class hokum of Perfume to this, a lackluster and derivative entry in the category of the Michael Clayton and Bourne type of precipitous action movie. But compared to those models, this one is the noise and excitement without the emotion. Despite fine crafting and a $50 million budget that's well used in physical terms, ultimately The International is not enough fun, isn't involving enough, and doesn't make enough sense. Smooth, slick, good looking, and totally empty, this is a thriller with form but no substance.

©2009 Chris Knipp
CineScene