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The International

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

The International has some very good scenes and a handful of interesting ideas, but it's ultimately done in by an anticlimactic ending and a plot that's too impenetrable for it's own good.

It is confusing. I've been accused of not paying enough attention to details when I watch movies -- for example, I hardly ever remember character names -- but here, I was really trying to pay attention to the plot, and I'm quite sure a lot of it still went over my head. That point was driven home for me when the movie ends with a montage of newspaper headlines: it occurred to me that I didn't know whether the headlines were supposed to be considered good news or bad news.

That's right: I don't know whether or not the movie I just saw had a happy ending. Maybe that's the point. Still, I think you're supposed to draw some conclusion, beyond just wishing the movie would come with a crib sheet explaining various banking terms and what the heck the characters were even attempting to do in the last quarter of the movie.

Clive Owen stars as Lou Salinger (I looked it up), an Interpol agent trying to build a case against the fictional International Bank of Business and Credit along with a Manhattan district attorney played by Naomi Watts. (Why a Manhattan district attorney, I'm not sure.) Only problem is, everybody they find willing to talk about the IBBC ends up dead, sooner rather than later.

The IBBC is shady not only because they tend to kill people, but because they broker arms deals and play both sides of international conflicts. (As one man explains to the heroes in the film's best speech: the bank's source of power isn't the money they have, it's the debt they're owed.) But mostly, it's because rich bankers make very good villains -- and the movie has the good fortune of being released in the middle of an economic crisis, giving it an added real-world heft.

The International obviously aspires to be a throwback to conspiracy thrillers from the '70s like Three Days of the Condor. In its best scenes -- a carefully-honed tense opening sequence, a sensational shoot-out that takes place in the Guggenheim Museum -- it earns those comparisons. But other times you begin to suspect that the movie only seems confusing because it doesn't make a lot of sense. I still don't understand why the bank needed two snipers. Or why the IBBC can kill anyone on a whim but doesn't seem to bother to go after the two people trying to build a case against them. And the plotting relies on one too many blatant coincidences. The movie also has a couple of disturbingly gory moments that tonally have ...