Cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ulrich Thomsen, Brian F. O’Byrne; Director: Tom Tykwer; Producers: Llyod Phillips, Charles Roven, Richard Suckle; Screenwriter: Eric Singer; Music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer; Editor: Mathilde Bonnefoy; Genre: Drama/ Thriller; Cinematography: Frank Griebe; Distributor: Columbia Pictures; Location: New York, USA; Running Time: 118 min;Technical Assessment: 3
Moral Assessment: 3
CINEMA Rating: For viewers 14 and above
The IBBC, a global bank with headquarters in Luxembourg, does not merely lend money but also broker’s arms deals. In fact, its power-grabbing board would have no qualms about assassinating anyone who gets in its way or gets to know too much. On this premise, Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) who witnesses the mysterious death of a partner while working with him in Berlin, obsesses about meting out justice to IBBC’s victims. Sharing his probing dedication is New York assistant district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), and together they pursue IBBC’s ruthless principal Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich
Thomsen), and the bank’s sinister German fixer, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Their sleuthing takes them from New York to Milan to Istanbul, but whenever they would be on the brink of proving their case, the evidence vanishes.
The International succeeds in creating a scenario that would not seem improbable in a global economic situation that many fear has gone haywire. Surely with the restraint employed by director Tom Tykwer, Owen—intense, handsome and unshaven—comes on as the perfect Interpol agent who loses sleep on a case. Watts also plays up the plucky lawyer side of her character (and even swears like a man at one point) so that the platonic quality of the partnership between Salinger and Whitman is enhanced. There are no heroic feats for the hero here, not even stunts that are physically unlikely outside of a movie, because it is precisely his vulnerability that the plot tries to explore as he bears the weight of the conflict between the desire for justice and the dangers of vigilantism. Just about the only adrenalin-drenched action you’ll find here is the shooting scene at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where the beautiful museum displays and installations being peppered with bullets threaten to distract the viewer from the gun battle going on. By the way, the Guggenheim shooting was filmed on an interior set in Germany.
The International delivers not so much a moral lesson as a moral warning. If there is one eye-opening thing it can do to moviegoers, it is arousing in them the suspicion that such a situation as this could not be far from being real. If movies in the past showed money-laundering as the worst that banks can do, The International is saying that keeping secret Swiss bank accounts is kindergarten stuff compared to international intrigue, arms trade, and murder that bankers may now be engaged in. That banks, armies and governments actually network independent of national boundaries could be frightening to dwell upon, particularly if you detect a connection between a country’s war expenditures and its plummeting economy. We dread to see the day when missiles and warheads are sold over the counter—like headache pills—but in The International that day is already here. All because bankers have jumped into the power-grabbing fracas that used to be the exclusive turf of armies and politicians.
