“The International” Movie Review
“The International” (quality rating: 6 out of 10)
Director: Tom Twyker
Screenplay: Eric Singer
Cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl
Time: 1 hr., 58 min.
Rating: R (some violence, vulgarity)
Y’know, in a movie, you can have stakes set so high that they’re insurmountable. This sort of thing deprives it of suspense. But if Clive Owen is your hero, it can work modestly.
So how about a bloody — really bloody (you know, like when they gush blood long after they’re dead) — world class shoot-out in Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum in which a dozen or so shooters are all armed with the Israeli Uzi (the sequence was entirely staged on a massive, re-creation in an old railway roundhouse in Berlin). Sure, that’s just fine, but what’s the plot here? The premise in “The International” is that there exists a gargantuan bank cartel in Europe which effectively finances all terrorism going on the world, whether drugs, arms shipments, Al Queda, Hezbollah, Russian organized crime or whatever. And that’s what Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) as pursuing.
The tone of the film much resembles any of your TV crime series, facedowns between information-gathering law people, a few chases — none overdone in the film — but with our protagonist, helped along lightly scripted with Naomi Watts as his cheerleader, facing such colossal odds, the probabilities of things happening so smoothly are, paradoxically, what makes the storyline rough.
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