A global conspiracy by evil bankers to dominate the world's finances through debt and transactions as elaborate and fragile as a skyscraper built from playing cards? Made before the Great Recession but released in time to capitalize on the chaos, The International's prescience is actually less impressive than its steady-going pace and believable acting. It's a well-made thriller for all seasons.
The International stars Clive Owen as Louis Salinger, an Interpol agent frustrated not only by his agency's impotence but the stonewalling of police from all nations. The bee in his bonnet is a Luxembourg-based bank called IBBC, which he believes has gotten away with murder-literally-while covering up its machinations. Owen plays the part like an angry young Brit in a tradition that began in the 1950s with Richard Burton's earliest films and continues through Daniel Craig's turn as James Bond. At his side is fresh-faced Naomi Watts as Eleanor Whitman, a crusading Manhattan assistant district attorney. The wonder of The International is that she's gunning for bankers in Luxembourg rather than around the corner on Wall Street.
The International is a tense movie of furtive meetings in parked cars and art galleries and assassinations by poison darts on crowded streets in an atmosphere thick with the haze of suspicion. A bad Hollywood movie would have overplayed key scenes, injecting the action with the steroid of melodramatic music. Fortunately, The International was directed by Germany's Tom Tykwer (who also co-wrote the score). Tykwer came to attention with the turbocharged Gen-X angst of Run Lola Run (1998) and has had a mixed career since with the strangely moving Heaven and the pretentious stench of Perfume.
Tykwer approaches The International, his first Hollywood genre picture, like a film history student eager to apply the lessons of the past to the present. The drop-dead action scene, a shootout along the spiral ramps of the Guggenheim Museum covered with video installations, tips the hat to scenes from Alfred Hitchcock's underrated Saboteur. It's what one imagines the Master of Suspense doing nowadays had he lived. Hitchcock might also have appreciated IBBC's world-weary, philosophical security chief, Col. Wexler (played with suitable gravitas by Armin Mueller-Stahl). Wexler is an ambiguous and shadowy figure, a commander of the East German Stasi who went to work for the hated capitalists after the Berlin Wall fell. Terribly flawed as were the values of the regime he served, his Leninism at least has left him with a means to assess the work he's doing. In his heart, he knows he's wrong.
