Run Clive Run

Not since The China Syndrome, James Bridges’ gripping thriller about a faulty nuclear power plant, hit theaters 12 days before the meltdown at Three Mile Island have real-life events conspired to prime audiences for a movie. If The International is seen only by people who currently harbor negative opinions about banks, this movie is going to rule the box office for weeks to come.

Of course, the fictional Luxembourg-based bank behind the title of this robustly enjoyable new thriller is despicable for wholly different reasons than our venal American institutions. It wouldn’t surprise me if viewers found themselves wishing they could transfer their accounts to a bank like this, one that, whatever its other moral failings, certainly knows how to make money.

A facilitator of shady transactions among various international governments and extra-governmental agencies, IBBC (as it’s most often referred to) is about to solidify its position by brokering a deal in which China will become the supplier of small arms to various Third World nations. IBBC’s long-term goal is to be the main player in managing debts accrued by nations at war—and if you’ve been paying any attention to the costs of the single war that our country has been waging in Iraq for most of this century, you’ll understand what a big pile of moolah that can be.

All that stands between IBBC and its goal is Louis Salinger, agent of Interpol. Formerly with Scotland Yard and chafing at the fact that his new employer is into gathering intelligence and not actual enforcement, Salinger is played by Clive Owen. He couldn’t be more perfect for a part like this, which along with occasional running and shooting involves a great deal of smouldering angrily while European eco-potentates in expensive suits condescendingly brush off his inquiries. Told that IBBC is in business with too many of the world’s power players for them to worry about ever being prosecuted doesn’t put Salinger off the case—it just makes him determined to find another way to bring the International down.

(Don’t be fooled by advertising that makes it look like the film co-stars Naomi Watts. She’s in here, as a Manhattan assistant district attorney with whom Salinger is working, but her part was presumably trimmed in the reshooting process the film got since its release date last you was pushed back. I can’t believe she would have signed on if her role was as small in the script she read as it turns out to be in the finished film.)

A German production made for the world market, The International was directed by Tom Tykwer. After making a splash 10 years ago with the propulsive chase movie Run Lola Run, Tykwer might have been expected to move directly to Hollywood. Instead he indulged the artier half of his vocation with films like the Krzysztof Kieslowski-scripted Heaven and the bizarre Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Those were arthouse films with a commercial sheen, just the opposite of this new movie.

There are certainly some lumps in the script by first-timer Eric Warren Signer, inspired by the Bank of Credit & Commerce International scandal of the early 1990s. The plot makes a few big forward lurches with improbable bursts of expository dialogue (an Italian arms dealer casually explains most of it to Owen a half hour in). There’s one coincidence so unlikely you can’t help but wince, when a globe-trotting assassin that Salinger and some Manhattan cops have been tracking walks past them just when they seem to have hit a dead end.

But overall The International is so slickly made that I was able to overlook its other failures. There’s a big shoot-out sequence set on the spiraling corridors of the Guggenheim museum that all by itself is worth the price of admission. (Note the way Tykwer integrates the action with the movement on the video displays in the museum.) There’s enough rapturous aerial photography of various European cities, focusing on some glorious modern architecture, to make you check the exchange rate on the euro and ponder an overseas vacation.

With splendid villains played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O’Byrne and Ulrich Thomsen (of the Danish film Brothers, which played locally a few years back), The International is an engrossing throwback to the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. The ending is something of a letdown, perhaps as a compromise that came up in the reshooting process. But overall it has little competition as the best film for grown-up audiences currently in theaters.