The International

Clive Owen is beginning to get typecast.  If that doesn’t tell you what this movie is going to be like, then you haven’t been paying attention.  He’s got a gun, a mission, and a bad attitude.  I’m not saying it doesn’t work; I’m only saying I wish he would take more movies like Children of Men.  That’s a real mission.  This one is trying to take down an assailant, which happens to be a bank.  In this economy, this movie should work.  It does work on a few levels (to be generous).  The rest is predictable or unjustifiably unpredictable.  Both are pretty frustrating, and both are repellents for getting butts in seats.  Good thing it’s got Clive Owen, I guess.

The International is an odd movie.  For one thing, the title makes no real sense.  Who is the international?  Owen’s character?  The bank he is against, the IBBC?  The film crew, for all the SkyMiles they got?  I’m not sure, and I think director Tom Tykwer wasn’t sure either.  The movie is confused in lot of ways.  Besides the title’s identity crisis, we’ve got at least one character (Naomi Watts) whose role in the story is questionable filler at best.  These two are supposed to be a tag team, it appears, but Owen’s character, Louis Salinger, has other plans…mostly involving trying to keep Watts out of the script.  It didn’t work, and so we’re stuck with her awkward character seeking importance and her struggling performance in it.  This isn’t really her fault.  But none-the-less, it’s unappealing and mildly distracting from the plot.

The plot.  Well, Salinger is trying to take down the IBBC, a bank involved in international (there’s that word again) affairs of giant proportions.  What are they doing?  Well, no one knows, but it probably has to do with arms dealing and at one point, someone with soi-disant importance says it has to do with “power.”  Thanks for that.  As if we, the unsuspecting audience, had no clue.

Ludicrous plot aside, we are given at least a few select moments of interest or, at the very least, fun.  There’s a shoot-out scene on just about every floor of the Guggenheim, with lots of guns, lots of destruction of very expensive museum architecture, and no meaning.  Well, very little, anyway.  But all that meaning stuff aside, it’s a pretty good dose of fun.  That scene, I mean.  Not the movie.  And while the movie is full of very suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat tension, I never really knew what I was tense about, except for the safety of our one-dimensional  protagonist.

Owen’s performance is extremely one-note, but I think that’s a result of the ridiculous script and incongrous directing.  Watts is, as mentioned earlier, completely unnecessary.  And the plot is based in reality only to the extent that no one flies or shoots lasers from their eyes.  If the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be, the audience is left confused and frustrated.  And the ending just eggs it on.  This one gets a star for effort and another one for keeping me in the theater.  Skip it.  Unless you’re a Clive Owen enthusiast.  But even then, this just might upset you.  

Rating: 2/4 Stars