The International is the rare film that must have had 20/20 foresight. By the time the movie began shooting in September 2007, its director, Tom Tykwer, and its screenwriter, Eric Warren Singer, had targeted a global bank as the ultimate contemporary villain. Its directors hope to manipulate the world by enslaving governments to debt.
The film pivots on a rocky Middle Eastern arms deal the bank has been brokering. As Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and Manhattan prosecutor Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) dig closer to the truth, they grow to understand how an organization such as the fictional International Bank of Business and Credit plays antagonists such as Israel and Syria against each other.
The political consequences of these maneuvers can be devastating, but all the IBBC cares about is increasing each player's financial liability. It doesn't want any country to go Red in a Marxist sense. (It even sets up a fall guy to be identified as a member of the Red Brigade.) It does want everyone to land in the red - financially.
Give this much credit to The International: It does know what classic movie intrigue is supposed to be all about. It leaks tantalizing bits of information about mysterious characters such as the IBBC's security chief (Armin Muehler-Stahl) and his favorite assassin (Brian F. O'Byrne) - just enough to make you want to learn more about them. Even better, these guys have a surprise or two left in them when Salinger confronts them with the truth and ties them into a pattern of corruption and amorality.
If only Salinger, Whitman and the script measured up to the dazzling panache of the settings (in Milan, Berlin and Istanbul), the deluxe yet turbid atmosphere of outrageous corporate wealth and power, and the audacious mayhem of a shootout in the Guggenheim Museum. (In a very modern-art way, director Tykwer, in that sequence, says, "Modern art - take this!")
Overall, though, the movie lacks the dash, wit, authority and character to become a first-class thinking-man's thriller. By the end, the deluxe accouterments fall away, and you're left with little more than the solid working-out of a plot. Of course, these days, it's bracing to see a suspense film take its time with complications and bring gravity to almost every death. But the movie too often plods even where it could be playful; the script doesn't give its heroes a single witty line. And sometimes, the plotting, too, appears to be perfunctory, as when Whitman simply walks a wanted man out of a police station.
