"The International" won't go down as an action thriller for the record books, but it's a pretty good one for right now. First of all, the villain is a bank. How's that for timing?

Like the bank, the movie has its tentacles into everything: wars, geopolitics, finance, the developing world, local law enforcement, Europe, the United States. In an unsophisticated but instinctively right sort of way, "The International," which opened this year's Berlin Film Festival and goes into general release today, strives to be a movie about the modern world. The message: It's a big mess.

The pessimism in "The International" is of a kind we haven't seen since the 1970s. Action thrillers are normally the realm of good guys and bad guys, after all, of simple moral schemes. This picture has its heroes and villains, too, but mainly it suggests that things have gotten way past that old model. Director Tom Tykwer presents a world in which the systems that people live under are so corrupting that there's no pure stance left for the individual to adopt, either in support of the beast or in opposition to it. Life, morality and selfhood are irrelevant. The bank owns everything and people are interchangeable, just tenants populating the earth for the time being.

Clive Owen stars as an idealistic man who still believes. He's an Interpol agent whose obsessive mission is to expose the bank's corruption and bring it down. We first meet him in close-up, in the rain, looking anxious and pensive. For the rest of the movie, he still looks as if it's raining. We begin in Berlin, where Louis (Owen) hopes to get a crucial piece of evidence against the bank. But the bank is like an evil Santa Claus. It knows when Interpol witnesses are sleeping, knows when they're awake, and knows how to cause a car accident or fatal heart attack when necessary.

Think of "The International" as a thriller of the future made in the language of the past. The story and situation are complex, while the characters are routine and the dialogue occasionally clunks. Because in a thriller things like story are more important than clever repartee, the film's flaws can be ignored, but before you ignore them, you notice them. Naomi Watts plays an American government agent, and she's about as believable as the idea of Naomi Watts as a government agent. She's appealing, but only because of her personality and star wattage. She's in lots of scenes, but the role isn't much.

Owen fares better, in that he gets to play the character in transition. Louis is a driven, humorless, uncompromising man, whose sense of justice compels him to find out more about the world than anyone would want to know. He's ably matched by Armin Mueller-Stahl, as a former German communist who works in the upper reaches of the bank. As an idealist who long ago lost his soul, Mueller-Stahl is the nightmare of what Louis could become.

The great merit of Eric Singer's screenplay is that he keeps the story advancing, even as the worst keeps happening. Every plan our hero devises is overturned, and yet each crisis presents the chance for a new plan.

By the way, look out for the film's big shootout inside New York's Guggenheim Museum. It's detailed and exceptionally well executed, and the setting provides an eloquent statement in itself, with the high and low of human aspiration under one roof. If you want to hold on to a civilization, the movie is saying, this whole banking and bloodbath thing is probably not the best way to go about it.

-- Advisory: This film contains graphic violence and strong language.

To hear Mick LaSalle talk about movies, listen to his weekly podcast at sfgate.com/podcasts.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle