Banking on money, terror & arms deals

The International

Certification: PG

Cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ulrich Thomsen, Brian F O'Byrne

Director: Tom Tykwer

Genre: Thriller, Drama

THE International comes at an opportune time when the world is in an economic crisis and banks all over are barely keeping afloat from the result of shady investments and risky hedge fund deals. Making banks the villain should be an easy sell at this time but apparently not so much with this movie.

The script by newcomer Eric Singer offers another idea of what big corporate banks are capable of. Money laundering and arms dealing are examples of what actually happened with The Bank of Credit and Commercial International (BCCI) founded in 1972 in Pakistan and registered in Luxembourg, which the script is loosely based on.

The International marks Tom Tykwer's first big budget movie. Tykwer's first recognition came almost exactly a decade ago with the highly praised Run, Lola, Run. But his unique directorial style that has been coined as pop-savvy and globally-minded has now been outdone and overtaken by the likes of Paul Greengrass and Danny Boyle, to name a few.

The antagonist of this particular story is the fictional International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC), with its very sleek headquarters situated in Luxembourg. Run by a businessman named Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen), his employees are all experts in covering up the crimes that the bank is involved in with customers that represent terrorist groups and organised criminals.

Now the bank is working on an arms deal that will supply weapons to the military factions in the Middle East. But the Interpol has two agents getting close to blowing up their covert operation with the help of a whistleblower. So IBBC sends in its "Consultant" (Brian F O'Byrne) to make the problem "disappear".

Having to watch his partner die in front of him, Interpol agent and ex-Scotland Yard Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), backed by Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) from the New York District Attorney, makes it his personal vendetta to bring the faceless corporate giant down. This is Tykwer's first chance at working with big names like Owen and Watts, but the main star of the movie has to be Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece in New York City, the Guggenheim Museum. A whole 15 minutes is devoted to destroying it with machine guns from within. The destruction of art, by art, is just mayhem in its glorious art form. And these 15 minutes is the best part of the two-hour long movie because even though the script properly builds up a momentum, nothing here seems important enough for the audience to care.

Owen is back to his sombre, grimy, unshaven, Children Of Men portrayal. In one scene we see him bury his face into a basin of cold water and ice, but that's about it as far as his character's psychological detail is concerned.

Watts suffers more in that aspect, and Watts seldom has this problem. Constantly looking tired and lacklustre, her character is so underdeveloped that she could be played by a lesser actor and it wouldn't have mattered. Worse is, the two leads share no chemistry whatsoever.

And in the end when Salinger has to make a difficult decision, we don't really care what happens to him because there has not been anything for the audience to invest emotionally in right from the start.

The only thing the movie really has going for it is the cinematography and the beautiful shots of the different cities, from Lyon to New York to Istanbul. But as a thriller, it's just not thrilling enough; it doesn't come with a soul.

And it feels much longer than it actually is. Most of the time, we're just going through the motion with this one.

Reviewer's Rating: 5 / 10

The Brunei Times