Actioner about an evil bank arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.
Two of director Tom Tykwer’s previous films – Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior – feature their respective heroes robbing banks, so it’s probably no surprise that The International, his latest effort, centers around a pair of noble lawmen trying to bring down a corrupt banking institution. But unlike those earlier exceptional works the film fails hard, thanks in large part to first time screenwriter Eric Singer’s disrespect for mundane details.
The hero this time around is Louis Salinger (Clive Owen, Children of Men), an Interpol agent with a deeply personal vendetta against the International Bank of Business and Credit, a corrupt worldwide corporate leviathan that, beneath its legit activities, caters to money launderers, gangsters, political revolutionaries, and other criminals. With the help of New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts, Eastern Promises), Salinger pursues his crusade around the world, inevitably finding his integrity and his morals compromised along the way.
Ostensibly aiming for a more cerebral approach than the decade’s legion of Bourne imitators, Singer’s complicated script routinely gets lost in its own complexities. The Bank’s elaborate scheme – controlling the sale of Chinese missile launchers to conflict zones around the world, thereby positioning the Bank to have unfettered manipulation of global debt – demands the viewer’s attention but ultimately collapses under a tangle of narrative shortcuts and obfuscations. As a Bank employee (Armin Mueller-Stahl, Avalon) explains at one point, the difference between truth and fiction is that “Fiction has to make sense.” But Singer ignores his own logic, and as a result the story grows littered with paradoxes and conundrums that fly in the face of real world, “truthful” logic. It’s never fully explained why Whitman, a New York ADA, is allowed or even able to gallivant around Europe on the trail of European criminal activity. For that matter, what kind of villains would employ a hitman with an obvious, easily discernible disability? And how is Whitman able to get a hold of a top secret CIA dossier when the agency is supposed to be heavily involved with the Bank’s activities?
Perhaps the most egregious jettisoning of logic is the film’s central set piece, staged in a life-size scale replica of the Guggenheim museum. Salinger engages in open warfare with a slew of Bank-employed hitmen brandishing automatic weapons, even as clusters of innocent bystanders run and hide for their lives. The complete absence of first responders and security guards is so conspicuous and so completely out of tonal sync with the rest of the movie – loud, dumb and overly drawn out to the point of tedium – that the film’s momentum fully grounds to a halt. Like a daydream during a Poli Sci lecture, the entire sequence is a bit of fluff that ruins the impact of the heavier content taking place it.
Admittedly, abstract displays of socioeconomic malevolence are nigh impossible to display within a two-hour movie without boring the audience straight towards the exits. But it’s disappointing all the same that Tykwer takes the easy way out and conveys the Bank’s evil through intermittent exhibitions of extreme violence. The murders of Salinger’s colleague and of a sympathetic political candidate are loaded with viscera, but the Guggenheim sequence contains more blood and gore than some low-budget horror films. By comparison, acts of violence against the Bank’s personnel either occur off camera or are downplayed with minimal detail. It’s a disingenuous, at this point clichéd trick: rather than explore any moral ambiguity, the filmmakers sanitize violence against evil men by isolating the audience from it (even as they are brutally subjected to garish displays of wrath against the innocent). Loaded with detail on one end and gore on the other, such issues never rise above the muddle.
Given such a situation, it’s sometimes possible for a film to become redeemed through its performances, but that’s not the case here, but the casting is starting to feel a bit knee-jerk: misanthropically violent, European settings, political intrigue – this thing could only star Clive Owen. If you’ve seen Closer, or The Bourne Identity, or Shoot ‘Em Up, or Children of Men, or Sin City, then you know exactly what to expect – staring laser beams, gravelly voice, snarling, blah, blah, blah. The lovely, reserved Watts’ presence serves as a reminder of the vastly superior Eastern Promises (in which she starred opposite Viggo Mortensen, a bona fide actor), and while she’s an incredibly beautiful and talented she’s also miscast as a workaholic civil servant. Still, the film’s most interesting idea is its villainy, and the villains dominate their screen time: Brian F. O’Byrne shines as the intense yet nondescript hitman, and Ulrich Thomsen exudes sinister, dispassionate charisma as the Bank’s mastermind.
Finally, something about the music. While The International marks the first film where Tykwer doesn’t participate in screenwriting duties, he did once again compose his own musical score (along with frequent collaborators Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil). Sadly, this disappoints as well. The theme to The Princess and the Warrior was a haunting, ethereal work, and the riveting score to Run Lola Run remains a masterpiece both among soundtracks and the techno genre as a whole. What a shame, then, that the score to The Internationalgenerates no impressions one way or another. For any other director, such a venial flaw would not be noteworthy; but in light of his previous successes, Tykwer’s perfunctory musical effort only serves to dampen the film’s energy even further.
Undeniably the most mainstream of his films, one can’t help but wonder if The Internationalwould have been a stronger picture if the director had assisted Singer with the screenplay or taken the time to tailor it to his signature filmmaking style. Instead, moviegoers are left with a fragmented, derivative genre picture that its own director couldn’t reconcile. Considering the crucial sociopolitical relevance of the subject matter, there’s still a good story in there somewhere – but if Tykwer can’t be bothered to find it, we shouldn’t be expected to look.
- Stephen Kabel
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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)
