Bankers as bad guys?
A few months ago, there might not have been an audience for a movie built around the notion.
Instead, it provides a timely hook for “The International,” a satisfaction-guaranteed thriller starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts.
The title of this passport-stamping ride refers to the IBBC, a financial institution overreaching its role in lethal ways.
Headed by the sort of cool customer who doesn’t look like a murderer, the bank is into a bit of everything but particularly defense contracts.
The purveyor of debt and destruction is the target of a sting that has Interpol agent Louis Salinger and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman working together. When their colleague is killed attempting to turn a witness, they are drawn deeper into concentric conspiracies.
Owen makes a scruffy, dogged protagonist. A former Scotland Yard man, Salinger hasn’t gotten used to the notion that he’s an investigator. He still behaves like a cop who can bust the bad guys.
Handsome more than pretty, he looks appropriately exhausted and infuriated by the death of his friend.
The bank’s ranking cabal is made up of exemplars of buttoned-down amorality. But two of the villains Salinger pursues stand out. One is a hired assassin, played by Brian F. O’Byrne, looking like Lee Harvey Oswald. The other is the man who hires him, former Stasi agent Wilhelm Wexler.
German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl (so chilling as the Russian mobster in “Eastern Promises”) has a rare gift for portraying complex monsters. When Wexler says lines such as, “Character is easier kept than recovered,” they ring ugly, wise, quotable.
Watts’ turn here as the dedicated assistant district attorney poses a troublesome question: How is it that one of the most interesting performers of her generation isn’t quite credible? One is tempted to chalk it up to Eric Warren Singer’s first-produced screenplay. Would a Manhattan prosecutor really find herself so deep into the far-flung action? Watts doesn’t appear to believe her character would either.
Influenced by the debacle of Karachi-based Bank of Credit and Commercial International, the story follows the money trail of a bank with tentacles in all ports, all governments. Unlike the recent James Bond installment, this action movie’s frequent-flier miles feel integral to the action.
With a vivid gaze, “The International” touches down in a number of intriguing cities. Berlin, Milan, Lyon, and Manhattan get their close-ups.
A confrontation in the curved contours of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum might have been action spectacle enough. Then the film jets to an Istanbul full of sun-dappled domes and minarets.
German director Tom Tykwer came to the fore with his frantic sleeper hit, “Run Lola Run.” Although not a perfect adaptation of a resistant novel, his English language debut, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” is a pungent attempt to capture what remains elusive in film — odors.
In “The International” he’s not merely dedicated to what is seen but what is heard.
“What was that sound?” we ask before things go awry in the opening minutes. Then we await the answer. It comes.
“The International” supplies the twisted dealings that fulfill conspiracy hankerings. Decent cops chase down leads. Bad cops try to thwart them. The film arouses fears that we may mistake one for the other.
“The International” is a sleek, engaging example of a peculiar form of escapist entertainment, a favorite, in fact: It’s a thriller that eases us away from our present worries without fully erasing a resonance with life beyond the multiplex.
Bankers exploiting international conflict and debt? Who’d have thunk it?
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
“The International”
R for some sequences of violence and language. 1 hour, 58 minutes. Directed by Tom Tykwer; written by Eric Warren Singer; photography by Frank Griebe; starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brían F. O’Byrne.Opens today at area theaters.
