The International

Rating: 

* * *

Verdict:

Eurocentric bank-biz thriller starts with high principle but can't sustain interest.

The International

tries really hard to be a thinking person's thriller. After all, it has the thinking person's action hero, Clive Owen, as the brains of its operation. It's got a premise about how if banks lose their moral compass they can do terrible things to the world. As well as high finance, it's got a thing for geography and architecture - one of Frank Lloyd Wright's best-known creations has a major supporting role.

The problem is, however,

The International

feels the need to do its thinking out loud. It's one of those films which burdensits cast with screeds of exposition, explaining its plot machinations nearly scene by scene, so it never really takes flight as a thriller.

Certainly, it has some rivetingly tense scenes but while it wants to be

Bourne

-with-brains, it just can't get up to speed, which is odd considering its German director Tom Tykwer made his breakthrough with the kinetic

Run Lola Run

. And with its stop-start pacing and a jetlag-inducing visit to one member of the EU too many, it feels longer than it really is.

However, there is still a cool precision to much of the film's delivery, especially in the first 20 minutes, which crackle with a tension that is soon lost in what follows. It visits some very flash buildings in some very scenic spots, and manages to shoot one of them up - the point where the thinking person's thriller takes a high dive and this turns into something far more formulaic and implausible.

Owen plays a haggard Interpol agent on a mission to take down the Luxembourg bank IBBC because of its dealings in weapons and the overthrow of Third World governments. As help he's got Naomi Watt's Manhattan District Attorney who, despite jurisdictional limits, is only too happy to be playing Watson to Owen's Holmes in Milan and elsewhere before her underwritten role is excised from the film in the closing reels.

The closer they get to the truth, the more the body count rises. The script was part-inspired by the case of the Pakistani-based Bank of Credit and Commercial International but the bank starts being just another evil institution the likes of which have been the bane of everyone from James Bond to Maxwell Smart.

It's still a serviceable thriller. But while it dares to think different, it just ends up with an idea overdraft.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Clive Owen, Naomi Watts

Director:

Tom Tykwer

Rating:

R16 (violence, offensive language & sexual references)

Running time:

118 mins