The International Genre: Action, Drama, Thriller
Duration: 1 hr. 58 min.
Starring: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O'Byrne,
Director: Tom Tykwer
Producer: Charles Roven, Jeffrey Lurie, John Woo, Lloyd Phillips, Steve Chasman
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: February 13, 2009
Writer: Eric Singer
Synopsis In The International, a gripping thriller, Interpol Agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) are determined to bring to justice one of the world’s most powerful banks. Uncovering myriad and reprehensible illegal activities, Salinger and Whitman follow the money from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul. Finding themselves in a high-stakes chase across the globe, their relentless tenacity puts their own lives at risk as their targets will stop at nothing – even murder – to continue financing terror and war. Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) from an original screenplay written by Eric Warren Singer, The International was shot on location in Germany and throughout Europe.Movie Reviews:
With prescient timeliness, bankers are the bad guys in this
globe-hopping, contemporary thriller, but the plot is so confusing
that the tension quickly dissipates.
The story begins with a mysterious assassination on the streets of
Berlin, accidentally witnessed by a scruffy Interpol agent, Louis
Salinger (Clive Owen), who is hot on the trail of ruthless
Luxembourg-based bankers from the International Bank of Business and
Credit (IBBC) who are brokering a huge deal for weapons sales. He's
working with New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman
(Naomi Watts) but European officials balk when they realize that IBBC
is involved, even after the powerful conglomerate is linked with a
political assassination in Milan. It becomes obvious that the gunman
is The Consultant (Brian F. O'Byrne), who escapes to Manhattan, where
there's a blood-splattered shoot-out amid the video installations on
the circular ramps lining the interior of the Guggenheim Museum, an
Upper East Side architectural landmark designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright. Then it's off to Istanbul for the final rooftop showdown.
First-time screenwriter Eric Warren Singer drew on the real-life
demise of the Bank of Credit and Commercial Intl., a Pakistani
institution that specialized in arms dealing, money laundering and
financing mercenaries and terrorists from the 1970s until 1991. In
this case, the aim of the fictional financial institution called IBBC
is to use the massive debt engendered by these weapons transactions
to gain long-term leverage over people in power throughout the world.
It's a sinister, sophisticated premise that needs more compelling,
three-dimensional characters.
Director Tom Twyker ("Run, Lola, Run") dutifully puts
Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and their international cohorts through their
paces but never develops a cohesive emotional investment for the
audience. Villainous Armin Mueller-Stahl has the best line of
dialogue, noting the difference between truth and fiction is that
fiction has to make sense - which this doesn't. So on the Granger
Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The International" is a frenetic,
far-fetched 5, an intense, often incoherent indictment of insidious
capitalism.
