Tykwer imbued his breakthrough film, Run Lola Run (1998), with the visceral power and cinematic invention of a born action filmmaker. His heart - as well as his brain - was engaged in a nonstop chase. Apart from the episode in the Guggenheim, the action in The International is distant and overcalculated. Tykwer deconstructs his most original coups. The result is simultaneously fascinating and unsatisfying.
The movie starts, for example, with an execution that Tykwer renders with flair: the shooting of a poison dart registers like an audiovisual rustle in the atmosphere. It's such a subtle, distinctive effect, you're certain Tykwer will return to it - and he does, but only for an uncharacteristic moment of cheap suspense. He's deliberately devaluing his natural gifts for kinetics and synesthesia.
When assistant district attorney Whitman gets hit by a car, the staging is so matter-of-fact it's as if Tykwer wanted to make a point about how routine collisions are hyped in other movies. Sadly, Whitman and that car make more of a dent in each other than do Owen and Watts. Salinger is an obsessed and shaggy lone wolf growing long in the tooth; Whitman is more of a team player; she's also married and a mother. It's refreshing that the moviemakers don't force a romantic connection between these two. But the usually spirited actors don't even share the rapport of the oddball man and straight-arrow woman teams that have become the center of high-end crime-solver TV shows such as The Mentalist and Lie to Me. Owen brings a whiff of demonic possession to his role. But screenwriter Singer weighs him down with gnomic utterances such as "Sometimes a man meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."
