By John Garces/entertainment editor
Bankers are evil and will stop at nothing to protect their own. At least that is the premise of the Tom Tykwer-directed thriller The International.
The movie is driven by the insatiable appetite of New York City Interpol agent Louis Salinger to bring down a corrupt Luxembourg-based bank known as the IBBC.
The film drives home its point that bankers are some of the most corrupt people on Earth and delivers a mostly enjoyable movie in the process. The Run, Lola, Run director pulls off his first attempt at a Hollywood action-suspense thriller.
Salinger, portrayed by Clive Owen, is joined in his quest to overthrow the IBBC by former Manhattan district attorney Eleanor Whitman, played by Naomi Watts. Owen gives a solid performance, but Watts appears to bring nothing of consequence to the role other than her supposed sex appeal.
The meat of the film has Salinger and Whitman following the illicit dealings of the bank to various locales around the globe, from New York to Lyon, France; Milan, Italy; Berlin, Germany, and Istanbul, Turkey.
In their efforts to bring down the bank, they discover it is in the midst of several shady dealings, including assisting rebels in Africa and brokering an arms deal with China.
But they quickly learn that anyone who gets in the bank’s way ends up missing or dead.
Because of the bank’s powerful hold on everything, the pair also must deal with their investigations into the bank being shut down at every corner.
A scintillating shootout scene at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, recreated for the movie on a soundstage in Berlin, sees the Consultant, the bank’s hired assassin played by Brian O’Byrne, caught in the crossfire and killed.
Owen then turns to a former confidant of O’Byrne, Wilhelm Wexler, played by Armin-Mueller Stahl, to take down the bank.
Warned by Stahl that he must think outside the parameters of the world’s justice system, Owen follows the bank’s bigwigs to Istanbul, where they meet to discuss the arms deals with the two warring sides. Desperate to take down the bank, Salinger and Wexler devise a plan to capture all of the bank’s dirty deals on tape.
Those who enjoy a lot of action in their suspense thrillers will find this one short on action scenes, but it delivers on the one shootout scene alone.
The ending, however, falls a little flat, particularly if a true resolution to the problem is what one expects to see.
This film takes aim at an easy target in today’s economic climate and delivers a mostly solid movie.
Still, if action-suspense thrillers are of interest to you, The International is worth the ticket price.
