THE INTERNATIONAL

Clive Owen and Naomi Watts try to bring down an evil multi-national bank in this surprisingly dull thriller from director Tom Tykwer.

So, I sat through all 120+ minutes of The International and here’s the sum total of what I can tell you about the plot:

1. There’s a big evil bank.
2. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts hate this bank.
3. Items #1 and 2 are very clearly not enough to create a compelling film.

Yet, really, there isn’t much more to the story than items #1 and 2 on that short list above. Surprisingly dull and tedious despite being helmed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), the film was boring and I walked out of the theater not really knowing what the point of the whole thing had been.

Owen stars as Louis Salinger, an Interpol agent who wants to bring down a multi-national bank that’s apparently responsible for funding all kinds of terrorist activities, corrupt regimes and general nastiness all over the world. Thing is, we (the audience) never actually see any of that nastiness... though all the characters sure do like to wax poetic about it over and over again. Anyway, Louis is working with Eleanor Whitman (Watts), a New York District Attorney’s office staffer equally peeved with the financial felons. But, again, the reasons are kind of murky beyond her professional obligation to get the bad guys.

Their main target is the head of the bank – Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen) – who doesn’t do much of anything in the film except play backgammon with his son and occasionally broker a deal that we can all assume is pretty nefarious. Also skulking about is Armin Mueller-Stahl as a longtime ally of the Evil Bank, who’s starting to wonder if their decades of work are about to implode in a really ugly way.

Whatever. Save for a few dramatic pursuit sequences and one admittedly kick-ass (though rather over-long) shootout that makes mincemeat of Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, nothing happens in this movie. We never really know why Louis or Eleanor are so invested in this case, since they’re already working on it when the movie starts. Do they have some kind of shared history? Maybe. It’s never clear. There’s no romance between the two, at all, rendering Watts especially pointless to the story. And the general impression left with viewers by film’s end is that nothing at all has changed, nor will it ever change. Once again, a key problem is that the bank’s dealings – or, rather, the evil they perpetrate – is only talked about but never seen. Perhaps the story should have borrowed a page from something like The Constant Gardener, where the ramifications of a corrupt corporation’s work are plainly (and painfully) evident and shown, it might have been more effective. Instead, we get the cinematic equivalent of:

“Hey, did you hear about that bank? It’s evil!”

“I know! Do you know how much evil stuff they do?”

“Oh, man, TONS of evil stuff!”

“I know! SO evil!”

“Yeah, they’re evil!”

And so on. But with bigger words.

Neither of the film’s two leads is particularly interesting, but Mueller-Stahl is always a welcome presence. So is Thomsen, though sadly he’s not present for much of the film. And surprisingly engaging is the nameless, brace-wearing assassin who gets a fair bit of screen time for about a quarter of the film. Otherwise, though, the performances are as yawn-inducing as the storyline.

The International is being marketed as a thriller, but it’s hardly thrilling. Your best bet might be to wait for DVD, skip over the endless streams of talking heads (there are a LOT of them) and just stick to the action. Come to think of it, the filmmakers might have been wise to follow the same course. 

Alas, they did not.