L'enquête - The international

"The International" is about an evil bank and begs the question; do these fricken things come in any other way? It's a fairly interesting story that got a major boost from current events last September once we learned that banks actually do have shadier dealings than expected. Only the ironic part now is will people be willing or even able to pay to see this movie. My recommendation would be wait for the DVD. Director Tim Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") does a decent directing job and for a while "The International" crackles with suspense but soon the interesting idea posed by the script, by Eric Singer, just fizzles out.

Clive Owen plays Louis Salinger, an Interpol agent whose been trailing the business practices of one of the biggest banks in the world, the IBBC, for what seems like years. Just when he manages to find witnesses, they either end up dead or manipulated into silence. He teams up with Manhattan District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) to bring the bank to justice but she's getting added pressure to shut this whole investigation down because the two are coming up with next to no evidence. The bank's trail of money, used for everything from arms deals to murder, sends Salinger and Whitman globe-trotting from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul but one dead end could shut the case down for good.

I'm usually not very cognizant of camera shots so the fact that i'm saying Tykwer really makes you think about perfect camera movement and angles really says a lot for what he does here. Not only does he start the suspense up early with strong verbal encounters/hard stares between characters but the way he frames and pans along the beautiful design of places like the Guggenheim Museum and the IBBC headquarters or the ancient buildings, narrow, bustling streets, and rooftops of Instanbul is fantastic. Nearly every scene has a lively visual quality. His one mistake actually comes with the movie's one big action sequence. It's a bloody shootout inside the Guggenheim but it just seems messy and hard to make out, a Paul Greengrass imitation without the exciting energy of a "Bourne" movie.

The screenplay by Singer is more than partly to blame. His story starts out well, catching our attention with the bank's deceptive and shady practices and building up a healthy dose of paranoia as well. The problem is the screenplay then lets itself off far too easily. Instead of focusing on how the bank creates slaves-to-debt and how the whole process works, the movie just vaguely and complicatedly brushes over those issues in favor of lazy, generic plotting. Salinger and Whitman soon find that their best option is pinning a murder on IBBC, just you would think a major bank could do better than hiring such an easily track-able killer. And where the movie really goes wrong is the conclusion, which doesn't go into how the bank is actually taken down as much as it just satisfies the audience's need for bloodlust. You can tell that no one knew how to end this thing.

Casting Clive Owen is a good idea. He brings a determined, serious demeanor to Salinger though with the type of roles he has played recently, you wonder why this guy turned down James Bond. He seems like a natural for it. The rest of the cast struggles with poor character development. Naomi Watts gets a role so useless that it could have easily been played by my grandma. Armin Mueller Stahl shows up as a former communist whose lost his way and now works with the bank as a consultant or something. He gets one well written scene, going man-o-e-man-o with Owen but otherwise not that many impressions are made by the cast. Unfortunately for the movie, try as Tykwer and Owen might, it also fails to make much of an impression as well.

The International (2009)

We can't expect every Tom Tykwer film to be as inventive or intense as Run Lola Run or The Princess and the Warrior, and The International feels almost like a breather, an intentional turn at a conventional film. It's an espionage and high stakes international drama with guns and deceit and a pair of very distinctly good good guys played by Clive Owen (brilliantly) and Naomi Watts (unconvincingly...probably just miscast). And overall it's completely enjoyable and slick, well paced, and beautifully filmed, of course.

The plot is one of those sprawling, behind-the-scenes conspiracy, third world, big money scenarios that must have shades of truth, or lots of truth, but gets simplified into a handful of bad guys and a parade of exotic locales (including the inevitable Third World warlord who is an intelligent and willing pawn in the whole game). What I mean is, the plot almost doesn't matter in the details, though it's interesting, and makes you think and worry a little about the world we live in. It's more how the heroes unfold the facts of the plot, against the odds, the clock ticking, that make the movie good. If you liked the Bourne movies (which are as a whole probably faster and more edgy) or Syriana (which is actually kind of similar in feel overall, Clooney substituted for Owen), this will really suit you.

And there is a Tykwer twist now and then, a camera with unusual fluidity, or a scene that gets replayed and rethought. Of course, the hugely complicated shootout in the Guggenheim is a masterpiece of excessive and brilliant kinetic filming. For an amazing short video on the building of the sets for this shoot (yes, it wasn't at the real Gug), go to www.firstshowing.net and type guggenheim tykwer.

In all? The best of it is worth the worst of it. A tightly made and not overly preposterous dip into a well stocked pond.

A life in film is a wonderful thing, in part because of the people you come to know intimately.

You learn how certain filmmakers twist ideas. How their imagination is shaped. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes it stays beautiful and by not changing loses its luster. Then you have guys like Tykwer. He develops. He tries new moves. He thinks deeply about film. He's the guy who reimagined "Rashomon." He's the fellow who stood with Cate Blanchett looking as Kieslowski with a Kieslowski script by God!

He made a film based on sight as smell, and recently one on cinematic sight through blindness.

Now he makes an action movie with, guess what? No sex, no car chase, no fight on the top of a train, no gasoline explosions. And he doesn't rely on that newspaper notion of "a thinking man's thriller," because he deliberately makes the template so ordinary it fades from view. It hardly matters that there is a bank involved. Its all about that vanilla bugaboo, the conspiracy that compromises the authorities and (usually) involves arms. Really, the story disappears.

What we are left with is an amazing use of context. I've seen James Bond, Jason Bourne and Laura Croft traipse through famous cities, but their beings are never affected. Tykwer, I surmise, saw this as an opportunity to do a Kieslowski with cities instead of rooms. Look at what he does, its an entirely environmental film. Its not quite enough, but if you are there already, its sublime.

What else? Well, test audiences did not get it, so there was a scene replaced, the one in the Guggenheim. If you have ever been in that building it is remarkable. Its a failure, an intrusive imposition. You can see where Frank knew that corners were bad, but he so mismanages the eye that you retreat into the art, or try too. Its an amazing, disturbing experience. Tykwer exploits the very things about this space that make it so unnerving.

He pretty much gleefully trashes it. This one scene, added after the movie was finished, makes the whole adventure worthwhile.

If you know architectural cinema, you'll know it was invented by Welles and depends on planes and corners. These are absent here. We have a new method, a new eye.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

No complaints at all about this gripping movie. The plot is original compared to the usual cops versus bad guys trash that often gets pumped out. The story centers around an international bank that makes its profits by supplying weapons to combatants in the various conflicts that cover the planet. Clive Owen is an Interpol guy trying to bring the bank down. The script is excellent, the acting is very good and the photography is above par for this kind of film. Excellent direction. This movie doesn't try too hard, is free of the clichés that often serve instead of fresh ideas and has a great shoot-out where the surprises and action keep you on the edge of your seat without trying to overwhelm with gore and jerky camera work.

Go see it, you'll enjoy it.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

As others have stated, the current banking scandals have cast a very grim light on bankers and the banking industry in general, and so The International is, if nothing else, a very timely and relevant thriller that plays on modern fears and frustrations. How it didn't do better at the box office with this in mind (maybe it was the recession? Hah, how ironic would that be, a film failed by the corrupt industry it's trying to expose?) is a mystery, but that it manages to be a genuinely intelligent and absorbing thriller anyway is a credit to it.

We have here a polished effort, slick, stylish and glossy and carried out with an accomplished flair that sets it a cut above some. In the lead role as the intrepid Interpol agent on a deadly trail of murder and corruption, Clive Owen continues to improve as an actor and has fine support, including the likes of Naomi Watts and Armin Mueheller Stall, carrying the story along as it gathers pace. The big down point, though, is that at the expense of this intelligence in the script comes a decidedly dull feeling to the film in parts, with maybe too much talking and too little action, which is counter productive to the riveting attention it's trying to demand. But this does improve towards the end and while there are some flaws, there are certainly more plusses. ***