..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The International
Directed by
Tom Tykwer

Bad timing, anyone?
    
Two big movies out this weekend have been condemned by some as suffering from timing problems, because of the economic mess -- and the subsequent changed national moods that mess has caused. The third big movie,Friday the 13th 2009, which, of course comes out on exactly Friday the 13th, has no schedule problem at all; it can’t be accused of anything beyond calendar opportunism and planning to run up a big score.
    
But those other two movies? Is The International, director Tom Tykwer’s smash-bang high finance thriller -- with Clive Owen and Naomi Watts battling a huge corrupt world-wide bank with a penchant for political chicanery and hired assassins -- really beside the point, now that some big banks in the U. S. have gone kerflooey? And is P. J. Hogan’s and producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s sparkly flick from Sophie Kinsella‘s chicks-in-the-city comedy Confessions of a Shopaholic really in unintended poor taste, because it’s being released when the economy is Bush-to-the-bone bad, and its humorous take on conspicuous consumption therefore apt to strike some movie customer nerves as a little obscene?
    
In both cases, I don’t think so -- even though, this weekend Friday the 13th will bury them both. But I enjoyed both International and Shopaholic, despite understandable qualms about shootouts in the Guggenheim and spending orgies in Bloomingdales.
    
In fact, Tykwer’s and Hogan’s pictures may accidentally profit (eventually if not now) from the vagaries of the economy. Didn’t screwball comedies and movie attacks on big bad bankers score big in the Great Depression? The public, assaulted by mortgage madness, financial foolishness, dangerous derivatives, bailout blues, yowling TV pundits and tax-cut-crazed conservatives, may well be in just the mood for a thriller like The International about an evil bank run by murderous financiers and super-rich investment crooks. And who could be more of a heroine right now that a pretty lady who can’t stop shopping, like Isla Fisher in Shopaholic? Credit be damned. Isn’t a little over-shopping just what the country needs?
    
The International, the better movie of the two, is a slick, fast super-thriller in the “Bourne” mold, which starts off in Berlin, where our attractively scruffy hero, Interpol agent and ex-Scotland Yard tough guy Louis Salinger (Clive Owen, at his Bogeyest) has found a whistle-blower inside the rich-and-rotten-as-hell IBBC, a.k.a. International Bank of Business and Credit. (IBBC is based on the real life, scandal-ridden and now defunct BCCI, or Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which went belly-up, after years of shady deals, in 1991).
    
Soon, both the whistle blower and the agent are dead, and Louis and his fellow bank-tracker, earnest New York City Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) are up to their ears in mayhem, with Louis running all over the globe in pursuit of slick, villainous IBBC operators and their professional assassins -- including Brian O’Byrne as a chief killer named The Consultant, Ulrich Thomsen as hunky double-dealing financier Jonas Skarssen, Patrick Baladi as one of those typical well-behaved little corporate creeps you’re always running into (this one named White), and the great German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl as the menacing mutterer, Wilhelm Wexler.
    
As in Shopaholic, there’s a lot of haute couture-as-character here. All these villains are dressed, uh, slickly, while Liz is a plucky Plain Jane and Louis is messy and angry. It’s a positive pleasure to watch Louis kick these smug money-men around and watch a few of them die -- though, of course, Louis is a step behind them, as well as the eight ball, for much of the movie.
    
The plot is complex and full of formula political thriller stuff. But The International also has great locations (Istanbul, Milan, Lyon, Berlin, Manhattan), and it’s so packed with characters that three ensemble movies could have been stuffed into it without a button popping.

It’s also a good arena for Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and his snazzy technique. Here, he’s reunited with his virtuoso Lola cinematographer Frank Griebe and fellow composers and Pale 3 band-mates Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Hell. (What a great name.) They all give us another set of wild rides --including what may be the wildest in of any movie this year: that mad Guggenheim shootout, starting with a tense but non-violent street pursuit, and ending with assassins and cops blazing away all over the Guggenheim‘s twisty circular ramp, before exhibits and video installations.
    
This is an incredible sequence. Staged to the nines on a look-alike replica of the Guggenheim, recreated on a Berlin soundstage, it‘s so kinetic and blow-you-out-of-your seat stunning, that it redeems the whole movie -- which doesn’t actually need that much redeeming. I’m a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, but not always of the soulless, phony abstract expressionist minimalism and junk-chic pop art that often found its way onto those walls. There’s something wondrously satisfying and absurd about seeing it all blown to hell like this. I’ll never scoff at its art again.
     
Clive Owen is the actor I would have chosen as the next James Bond. (I’m not saying I would have been right.) But I think I like him better in this kind of hard-edged, sad-eyed neo-noir tough guy role. Naomi Watts deserves more to do, but she does perfectly well all they give her. And though the movie lacks very many fully developed characters, it has lots of people and actors who catch your interest on the fly, like the “French Connection-ish” Manhattan street cops Iggy and Bernie played by Felix Solis and Jack McGee. O’Byrne and Mueller-Stahl are fabulous heavies: O’Byrne looks a bit like the younger Bob Newhart turned button-down killer. (You wouldn’t want to meet this guy in a board room.) and Mueller-Stahl has another of his now- patented ice-cold killer-philosopher roles. (You wouldn’t want to meet this guy in a seminar.)
    
The International had to be reshot for action, so it has bloodshed aplenty. The other big set pieces include a Milan political assassination, and another chase in Istanbul, through mosque and on rooftop, that somehow reminded me of Melville‘sLa Samourai. But the Gugghenheim shootout is the one you really remember. Hopefully, you‘ll also recall, while watching this, that politicos and bankers always have their own accounts to settle, whether they’re in BCCI, IBBC, or ICBC (International Conmen and Blowhard Creditors.)
 
-by Michael Wilmington

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