Susan Granger’s review of “The International” (Columbia Pictures/Sony Entertainment)
With prescient timeliness, bankers are the bad guys in this globe-hopping, contemporary thriller, but the plot is so confusing that the tension quickly dissipates.
The story begins with a mysterious assassination on the streets of Berlin, accidentally witnessed by a scruffy Interpol agent, Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), who is hot on the trail of ruthless Luxembourg-based bankers from the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC) who are brokering a huge deal for weapons sales. He’s working with New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) but European officials balk when they realize that IBBC is involved, even after the powerful conglomerate is linked with a political assassination in Milan. It becomes obvious that the gunman is The Consultant (Brian F. O’Byrne), who escapes to Manhattan, where there’s a blood-splattered shoot-out amid the video installations on the circular ramps lining the interior of the Guggenheim Museum, an Upper East Side architectural landmark designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Then it’s off to Istanbul for the final rooftop showdown.
First-time screenwriter Eric Warren Singer drew on the real-life demise of the Bank of Credit and Commercial Intl., a Pakistani institution that specialized in arms dealing, money laundering and financing mercenaries and terrorists from the 1970s until 1991. In this case, the aim of the fictional financial institution called IBBC is to use the massive debt engendered by these weapons transactions to gain long-term leverage over people in power throughout the world. It’s a sinister, sophisticated premise that needs more compelling, three-dimensional characters.
Director Tom Twyker (“Run, Lola, Run”) dutifully puts Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and their international cohorts through their paces but never develops a cohesive emotional investment for the audience. Villainous Armin Mueller-Stahl has the best line of dialogue, noting the difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense – which this doesn’t. So on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The International” is a frenetic, far-fetched 5, an intense, often incoherent indictment of insidious capitalism.
