For a guy who didn’t want to play James Bond, Clive Owen has carved a niche for himself playing Bond-like characters. Here, Owen plays Louis Salinger, a former Scotland Yard detective turned Interpol desk jockey. He teams with Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), a Manhattan district attorney, in an effort to bring down the IBBC, a massive banking conglomerate who deal in a number of illicit activities, including assassinations and illegal arms deals.
The International is an uneven hybrid of the 70’s politically-charged thriller and the hyperkinetic, globe-trotting Bourne franchise, replete with a rooftop chase through Istanbul. The film begins very much like The Parallax View with Owen in the Warren Beatty role. However, earlier cuts of the film met with negative responses from test audiences resulting in reshoots to turn it into more of an action flick. This resulted in The International’s ironically timed release in the midst of our post-Madoff economical shit storm era. The film itself is far too bland and clichéd to be of great interest. Clive Owen can pretty much sleepwalk through these stoic, tough guy roles while Naomi Watts makes no impact at all as the token female lead. All the villains in the movie are evil businessmen with well-tailored suits and funny accents.
There’s really only one reason to see The International and that is a 15 minute shootout inside the spiraling ramps of the Guggenheim in New York. While it may have looked like they riddled the real Guggenheim with more holes than the plot, production designers built a perfect replica on a soundstage in Berlin and shot it all to Hell. Director Tom Tykwer really shows off his incredible sense of style in the staging of this exciting set piece, even if he hasn’t been able to follow up Run, Lola, Run. The Guggenheim shootout is the type of set piece you wish John Woo was directing, instead of dicking around with stinkers like Windtalkers and Payback. It’s too bad the big gunfight isn’t the end to the film. It comes at about the halfway point and its all downhill from there with an anti-climatic resolution.
Rating: **
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