Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
2/15/09
Banks
are collapsing all over the world, prompting unprecedented pumping of taxpayer
dollars into their coffers in hopes that we can beg them to loan our own
money back to us without causing the entire global economy to slide into
depression. Moviegoers are itching for payback. Instead, we
get The International, a somnambulistic thriller that spends two
hours ensuring that an increasingly enraged Clive Owen learns that you
can't fight City Hall. Or in this case, the First Bank of City Hall.
Well crafted in almost every way that doesn't involve Eric Singer's bone-dry
screenplay, The International is the wrong movie at the wrong time.
It would always be boring, but now it's also a sad missed opportunity.
Let
me tell you about the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC):
because the banking business is all about debt, they've decided to go all
in on international arms trading so they control the debt of all the people
waging war all over the world (I know, I know, this is the kind of thinking
that got us into the Financial Crisis in the first place). Interpol
agent Louis Saligner (Clive Owen) has had about all of this crap he can
stand and has waged a one-man war against the IBBC for years, including
“that thing” that happened two years ago (like everyone in the movie, I
will politely decline to discuss it in detail). He gets even more
pissed when they kill his partner just after he met with a witness, and
then killed the witness besides. Louis is working with Manhattan
ADA Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), who's always getting threatened with
being bounced off the case by her boss (James Rebhorn). They get
a lead: an assassin (Brian F. O'Byne) who's been depositing bullets
in the bank's enemies. After an eternity spent tracking him down,
Salinger and a couple of cops corner him at the Guggenheim Museum, where
a spectacular action sequence breaks out and yet another lead emerges:
former Commie-turned-Capitalist Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl).
He cautions Salinger that every government and law enforcement agency in
the world is in the IBBC's back pocket. The only way to bring them
to justice is to abandon everything he stands for and take the fight to
them.
Here's
what I learned from The International: if you try to track
down a witness against a Global Banking Conglomerate, their hired goons
will put a bullet in that witness before they can tell you anything relevant.
Also, if your master plan depends upon recording a conversation, don't
use equipment that only works if you're standing really close to them.
Futility is The International's co-pilot, and its' plot consists
entirely, all the way to the end, of investigation, leads and plans that
fizzle out because the Big Bad Bank is better prepared and better staffed
than Louis Salinger's investigation. Owen burns admirably:
his seething rage to make some headway is totally understandable, but when
the movie spends truckloads of screen time on the IBBC making him wait
for meetings, doctoring reports and talking to him in really calm voices,
his impotence becomes almost comical (like the scene where he stands in
the middle of a busy street pointing a gun at a car that proves to be empty.
Damn bank! Foiled him again!).
Test
audiences no doubt informed the filmmakers that their movie is boring to
the point of satire, leading to reshoots that presumably produced the film's
centerpiece, a gigantic shootout between Salinger and The Consultant and
armies of hired goons that tears the Guggenheim to pieces. It's a
good, bruising sequence that shows off director Tom Tykwer's skills (who'd
have imagined after seeing Run Lola Run that he could ever make
a movie this dull). But it also causes the movie to sag ridiculously
toward its' own midsection. Literally every ounce of excitement it
has to offer comes raging at us like a cruise missile in ten minutes when
there are still 50 more to go. And the plan Salinger and Wexler cook
up to stop the IBBC is elegant in its' simplicity, just as long as a company
that's been an uber-monolith of covering all its' bases the whole time
suddenly becomes so stupid they'll let their arch nemesis just start following
their chairman around from ten yards while he takes secret meetings in
private rooms. What could possibly go wrong? And then Tykwer
simply cuts to black as though exhausted with his own enterprise and lets
a montage of newspaper headlines inform us that we're pretty much right
back where we started.
The
production, lensed in attractive locales all over the world, is impressive
and the score by the director, Reinhold Helm and Johnny Klimek admirably
tries to convince us we're watching a nail-biting thriller. So do
the actors, with Owen and Watts giving their roles everything they've got
and Mueller-Stahl doing a remarkable job pretending his character's boilerplate
philosophizing means anything. The various IBBC heavies beg for a
comeuppance that either never arrives or does off-screen. Hell, every
time Salinger even tries to kill somebody, an off-screen assassin seems
to show up to do the job for him. Seems the IBBC keeps him alive
just to piss him off some more.
Yes,
I keep circling around to complaints because The International tries
to dress up a perverse two-hour exercise in thriller inertia as a statement
about the ubiquity and power of global corporations. Of course, we
got that telegram a couple months back and the bill has come due.
If Louis Salinger doesn't plan to burn the International Bank of Business
and Credit to the ground, he might as well just let me hang onto my ticket
price. I might need it to buy a slice of bread in a couple months. |
