Issue date: 2/26/09 Section: Features

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo [Click to enlarge]

With the government handing out billions in bailout money to banks, it seems a geopolitical thriller about a bank would fit our nation's zeitgeist. Though the concept seems to work on the surface, the film itself does not.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is a somewhat obsessive Interpol agent. Driven by borderline mania, Salinger has dedicated the better part of his career to bringing down The International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC). The flames of his mania have been fanned over the course of years of near misses and close calls. Salinger is convinced the bank is deeply involved in many illegal activities, including small and large arms trading, money laundering and government destabilization.

At his side in his quest for justice is Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), a New York Assistant District Attorney who is not nearly as paranoid as Salinger, but nonetheless just as dedicated to bringing the IBBC down. When one of their colleagues winds up mysteriously dead, the two find themselves in a race against time before the bank can manage to forever silence their efforts.

On the positive side, "The International" has a lot of potential as a film. Apart from a certain amount of cultural relevance, the film features a solid list of actors and a handful of crew members with distinguished portfolios. The cinematography is traditionally styled, making use of the natural environment to create the proper cinematic tones.

Where exactly the movie left its tried-and-true track for something of lesser quality is hard to say. With tension mounting as the film careens toward its finale, one gets the sense that director Tom Tykwer simply realized a shootout was called for. That shootout takes place in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Though much of the stuntwork in the sequence is very impressive, the film veers into the realms of the unrealistic as Salinger successfully staves off a horde of assassins with submachine guns. Though things like this happen quite frequently in the movies of today, this shift felt out of place in a movie that was making its way forward with such attention to little details and overall realism.

More importantly, being a film with all the earmarks of a modern geopolitical thriller, one would expect an ending congruent with other films in the genre. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Beside being horribly anti-climactic, the ending attempts to jerk the story back into the realms of the "gritty realism."

After jerking audiences around for the better part of two hours, "The International" just comes off as a movie with an axe to grind. For the unhappy few in the audience, the shavings from this axe-grinding leave a bad taste in one's mouth. Snagging the audience with an exciting build followed by a dismal payoff, the movie ultimately emerges as a failure. Perhaps if the convoluted political message were more precise, the movie would have managed to find a more appropriate narrative trajectory. But "The International" seems unsure of exactly what it was trying to say in the first place.

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