Most Expensive Movie I've Slept Through This Year - 'The International' Review...

Posted on March 6, 2009 - 2:27am by michael Tom Tykwer's The International came about with a lot of promise. It has all the makings of a classy, intelligent espionage thriller. I was expecting something in the vein of The Interpreter or at least some of the fast-paced action of the Bourne films, but such is not to be the case. The movie pitts Clive Owen, a cinematic force to be reckoned with, to be sure, against the villainously corrupt international banking infrastructure, which seems to have acquired a taste for enormous missile deals. Unfortunately, the movie plods through every imaginable espionage cliche, and somehow manages to make its two hours feel like about five. And director Tom Tykwer hasn't done anything interesting since his brilliant film Run Lola Run in 1998, so it wasn't exactly a good career move to make such a high-profile and profoundly uninteresting film as this.

Maybe it's because I'm an American who hasn't lived in America for a few years and so the economic crisis doesn't have much of an immediate scariness for me, but for whatever reason, I found the economic string-pulling here to be decidedly unthreatening.

Clive Owen stars as Louis Salinger, a former Scotland Yard detective now working for Interpol and hot on the trail of what he is sure is a massive conspiracy of corruption and murder taking place within the banking industry. Naomi Watts is Eleanor Whitman, an American somehow involved with the New York District Attorney's office, who for some reason wants her to spend her time and energy to track down European banking criminals.

You may find yourself spending the first half of the movie feverishly trying to follow the twists and turns of the plot and keep track of all of the intricacies of wrongdoing that grows deeper and deeper with every scene, but by about the hour mark it becomes pretty clear that the movie isn't going to do anything new, and isn't even going to try to cover the well-treaded ground that it covers in any kind of fresh or interesting way.

It seems that an international bank called the IBBC has been engaging in shady arms deals which turn out to be efforts to control the debt created by international conflicts. "Control the debt," we learn, "and you control everything." I never really thought about it that way, although it does put my credit card debt in an entirely new perspective. I better pay that thing off, or I'm pretty sure I'm going to be somehow funding terrorist organizations.

Unfortunately, the banks in The International are so cartoonishly villainous that it makes the movie almost impossible to take seriously. Of course, economists have analyzed the plot and assured us that such things could never happen in the real world, but for a movie like this to really be effective, it helps if the premise is at least a little bit believable. Banks are all around us and are not exactly in favor at the moment, but do they have to be portrayed as the epitome of soulless, power-hungry war-mongers that will stop at nothing, even such trifles as high-profile, public assassinations, in order to pursue their criminal designs?

Clive Owen's biggest task in the movie is to sell his astonishment at the mind-boggling revelation that money and power do, in fact, breed corruption, and Naomi Watts' biggest task in the movie is to somehow come across as the slightest bit interesting when she bravely states that she intends to "blow this thing wide open."

Yawn.

Am I getting spoiled? Am I expecting too much from the movies? There are few things I hate more than people who are totally ungrateful for what they have in life, but am I wrong to expect more from the movies than something like this? Maybe I just expected a totally different pace in The International. The movie moves so slowly and ploddingly that by the time the climax finally lumbers across the screen I was spending almost as much time looking at my watch as I was spending looking at the movie.

I kid you not, less than five minutes before the movie ended, in the heat of the climax of the film, I was distracted by a text message from my friend. It seemed that he was suffering from a terrible case of intestinal gas and was getting pretty anxious about the implications that it would have for the yoga class that he was about to teach. I texted him back the most reassuring message I could think of and then came back to the movie and discovered that I hadn't missed much.

There is also little the matter of the Big Shootout. I don't want to ruin anything for you, but personally I am of the opinion that if I don't tell you that a two hour movie about banking corruption manages to culminate in a machine gun battle in none other than New York's Guggenheim Museum, I would be doing you a grave disservice. I've visited the Guggenheim's in Los Angeles and Bilbao, Spain, and while I haven't been to the one in New York, my understanding is that the resemblance of the re-created version for this movie is astonishing. Unfortunately, like the rest of the movie, the mind-numbing machine gun battle that takes place in it is not.

The Bean Meter

[caption id="attachment_24830" align="aligncenter" width="150" caption="2 Beans out of 5."][/caption]