By Dan Mecca
During a recession, a paranoid political thriller in which the bad guy is a debt-collecting international bank seems like an easy sell. Unfortunately, The International never takes the time to figure out what exactly it’s trying to say or how exactly it’s trying to say it. Although directed by the perennially-promising Tom Tykwer, the German director who gave us Run, Lola, Run over a decade ago, the film was doomed to fail, first and foremost, on the printed page. Written by first-timer Eric Warren Singer, the BIG messages rampant throughout the plot of this thing are as ambitious as they are convoluted, and it appears there was nothing Tykwer could do to distract viewers from this fact. There are no small lines in this film, just large lines comprised of altruisms that sound like the worst version of Robert Frost (“Sometimes a man meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it”).
Clive Owen stars as Louis Salinger, an Interpol agent bent on taking down IBBC, an evil multi-national bank with countless ties to terrorists, bombs and the like. The poorly cast, or simply under-utilized, Naomi Watts stars as Eleanor Whitman, a Manhattan D.A. also bent on taking down IBBC. There is literally nothing else about her character established – oh wait, she has a family, so I guess that was Singer’s sympathy angle.
Owen’s Louis is not much deeper, save a backstory involving IBBC that the film devotes around three minutes to, two of those minutes comprised of Watts relaying Clive Owen’s past mistakes TO Clive Owen, as if he needed to be reminded of his exact actions. It just feels like lazy writing, but then that’s exactly what it is.
Tykwer certainly has an eye for the frame and a whole lot of visual ambition, but it feels misplaced and spotty here, suggesting a possible “creative clash” between him and the producers. That would also explain the horrid release date and uneven pacing of the film. About 80 minutes in, there’s a 15 minute shootout scene in the Guggenheim museum that likely spills as much blood as the entirety of the Friday the 13th remake. It’s both ridiculous and fun. The rest of the film is certainly ridiculous, but definitely not that fun.
By the time the end credits roll, The International feels like a wasted opportunity, especially when considering the filmmaker and leading man involved. There are moments of subtle brilliance in the film, most notably a tracking shot of a car driving along a coastal road in which a bank member sits, unaware that he is about to be executed by the driver. As the camera pulls further and further away from the beautiful European-set coast the car enter a dark tunnel and never emerges.
Unfortunately, subtly is overruled by patronizing soliloquies catching the viewer up on the plot most of the time. Was Singer’s screenplay really this uneven and ham-fisted? If so, how did it get optioned among the thousands of available screenplays most certainly populating the entertainment world?
The film, which reportedly cost 50 million to make and took in only about 10 million in its opening weekend, is the definition of a lost cause, reminiscent of last year’s Babylon A.D., a sci-fi clunker directed Mathieu Kassovitz, who, like Tykwer, burst on to the scene with a small, but mind-numbingly visceral, film (in Kassovitz’s case, the film was La Haine).
The only thing visceral in this one is the bad dialogue, which will most likely cause an adverse reaction to the film. If the people who put up the money to make The International wanted to cut their losses this badly, viewers should do the same and wait for a better film about all-controlling evil banks to come out.
5 out of 10,
What did you think? Did you see The International? Did you like it?