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The International
Clive Owen and Naomi Watts get heavy on rogue banks. It’s a lot sexier than Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, especially as Clive’s brand of punishment means jail terms and broken noses, not bail-outs and bonus caps. The International is hardly the first film to make arrogant capitalists the heavies, but the timing could hardly be better. (At the Berlin Film Festival recently Watts joked the global recession was a publicity stunt.) In fact Tom Tykwer’s thriller is inspired by the BCCI scandal of the early 90s, when the world’s seventh largest private bank was revealed to be a front for arms trading, money laundering and tax evasion (the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International”, as it was known). Owen plays INTERPOL agent Louis Salinger, a former Met. officer until an earlier case against the dodgy IBBC fell apart when a key witness died in suspicious circumstances. Salinger has been trying to nail the bank ever since, but every time he gets close, the red ink flows. This is a solid set up for a movie, and Tykwer – the German director who gave us Run Lola Run, Heaven and Perfume – has hammered it into a serviceable facsimile of the superior paranoia thrillers of the 1970s – movies like All the President's Men, The Conversation, and The Parallax View.
Tykwer is very good at the logistics. His films always have a great eye for space and architecture, and he knows how to put a set-piece sequence together. The best thing about The International is the whirlwind tour it gives us of those modern glass and concrete pyramids that big financial institutions build for themselves all over the place: in Germany, Luxemberg, France, Italy and New York. The glass seems to promise transparency, but that’s just what they want you to think! The tour concludes (or should have) with a shoot out in New York’s curvaceous modern art gallery, the Guggenheim, which is easily the highlight of the show: Salinger is trapped near the top, with no way out, and only an assassin who has just been hired to kill him as an ally, as they face off against maybe a dozen more professional killers working their way up the spiral balcony towards them. It is a grand, extravagant gesture, in the spirit of Hitchcock and Woo. Silly, but grand all the same. More of that élan would have been fun, but for the most part Tykwer damps down the playfulness for a rather somber, earnest approach. I hate to bring up German stereotypes, but he takes it all too seriously. The performances are fine, but there’s no warmth – let alone heat – between Owen and Watts (as a Manhattan assistant D.A.). In fact, I would wager her role only exists to satisfy the requirements of whatever shady international financial consortium invested in this package.
I think I smell a script doctor in the house, too. Although it’s credited to one Eric Singer, the dialogue often sounds like it’s been translated into English. About three quarters of the way in, out of nowhere Salinger starts spouting hardboiled philosophy about destiny and such – perhaps it’s a remnant of some other draft of the screenplay, the Croupier-edition? The International isn’t a bad movie, but it fails to capitalize on its potential. Too many sequences smack of screenwriting 101: Salinger suspects his boss is being bugged, and smashes his telephone into pieces to prove it… a scene that would have been much more amusing if he’d been mistaken. Clive Owen looks the part, but too often he seems to be going through the motions. And like the real James Bond – Daniel Craig – he really should lighten up a little. Times are hard, we know, but not so hard that a hero can’t crack a smile? Tom Charity 
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Trevor Johnston, Time Out