The International comes at an opportune time when the world is in an economic crisis and banks all over are barely keeping afloat from the result of shady investments and risky hedge fund deals over the past years. Making banks the villain should be an easy sell at this time but apparently not so much with this movie.
The script by newcomer Eric Singer offers another idea of what big corporate banks are capable of. Money laundering and arms dealing are examples of what actually happened with The Bank of Credit and Commercial International (BCCI) founded in 1972 in Pakistan and registered in Luxembourg – which the script is loosely based on.
The International marks Tom Tykwer’s first big budget movie. And this is Tykwer’s first chance at working with big names like Clive Owen and Naomi Watts; but the main star of the movie has to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece in New York City, the Guggenheim Museum. A whole 15 minutes was devoted to destroying it with machine guns from within. The destruction of art, by art, is just total mayhem in its glorious art form.
And these 15 minutes was the best part of the two-hour long movie because even though the script properly built up a momentum, nothing here seemed important enough, or personal enough, for the audience to care.
Owen is back to his sombre, grimy, unshaven, Children Of Men portrayal. In one scene we saw him bury his face into a basin of cold water and ice, but that’s about it as far as his character’s psychological detail was concerned.
Watts suffered more in that aspect, and Watts seldom has this problem. Constantly looking tired and lacklustre, her character was so underdeveloped that she could be played by a lesser actor and it wouldn’t have mattered. Worse was, the two leads shared no chemistry whatsoever.
And in the end when Owen had to make a difficult decision, we didn’t really care what happen to him because there has not been anything for the audience to invest emotionally in right from the start.
Among the characters, only Armin Mueller-Stahl’s Wilhelm Wexler was the interesting one. With queit ruthlessness and gentle composure, it’s not difficult to stare into his eyes and straight into his soul, and have a sense of genuine care for the man’s ambitious goals. Unfortunately, his screen time wasn’t all that much.
The only thing the movie really has going for it was the cinematography and the beautiful shots of the different cities, from Lyon to New York to Istanbul.
But as a thriller, it’s just not thrilling enough; it didn’t come with a soul. And it felt much longer than it actually was. Most of the time, it’s just going through the motion with this one.
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