The International

The International

I almost feel like a hypocrite reviewing The International. Here I am, clamoring for films that don't dumb themselves down for the audience. And along comes The International, a smart procedural about Interpol agents and all I can think of is, "I wish they would just stop talking and blow something up."

What a slog of a movie this is. Ugh. Released ironically at the height of the banking crisis, The International is about an evil bank that likes to fund wars and military coups. And if you piss off this bank, they won't just foreclose on you. They'll probably send an assassin to blow you up instead. Enter Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and New York attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), whose lifelong mission is to bring down the evil bank.

What exactly is wrong with this movie? I don't know. The plot is interesting. The cinematography is terrific. The performances are uniformly excellent (Clive Owen really is among the best at this sort of thing). The problem may lie in that the movie isn't sure what it wants to be. Is it a procedural? In the first half, it sort of seems that way as our agents track the clues, scramble for witnesses, and conduct a series of interviews. They talk in one scene, followed by another scene of talking, followed by another scene of talking - somehow the plot is moved forward, but I'm not quite sure how. The second half of the film, which turns into a thriller is a bit better. But only marginally. Really, we just get a big buildup to nothing. The film's climax is a boring footchase in Istanbul - the city is so beautifully filmed that I kept thinking "Wow, what a pretty view. I wish those running people would get out of the way." That's not what you want for your climax!

There are a few reasons to see the movie someday, maybe when it's on TV. As I mentioned, the acting and cinematography are topnotch. And there is one killer action scene in the Guggenheim Museum. Shame the sequence really doesn't belong in this movie - it is like nothing before or after it in the film, which really makes it stick out awkwardly. But watched by itself, it's one helluva gunfight and worth checking out.

Overall, The International is a bit of chore to get through. I suppose not even assassinations and Clive Owen can make the banking industry exciting. 

MVP: Uli Hanisch, production designer, Stephen Brean, set designer, and the crew of location managers. The International features perhaps the greatest collection of cool buildings I have seen in a long time. Every major building made me say, "wow, where did they find that?!" The evil bank's HQ, the CEO's house on a cliff, Interpol HQ, the brilliant reconstruction of the Guggenheim's winding walkways, the plaza in Milan, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. And the interior sets are just as cool, from the sleek and cold lines of the Bank to the cavernous cistern underneath Istanbul. So kudos to the team of art designers, production designers, set designers, and location managers. Whoever is responsible for collecting this group of awesome locations that kept me interested during the boring conversations...my hat's off to you!

TRIVIA: The production team used the original blueprints and spent four months building the accurate interior of the Guggenheim Museum in an abandoned locomotive warehouse. It's a pretty impressive set...and boy, do they do some damage to it...

BEST LINE: Wilhelm Wexler: "Well, this is the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense."