Saturday, June 27, 2009

The International



To start off, I didn't like The International yet I admire what it wants to be. This film came at a time where the economy was going further downhill, and yet the film is almost as interesting as trying to understand the stock market. There is an awful lot of talking about the "how" behind this mysterious bank that is committing a lot of crimes, but we get very little of the who/what/where/when/why that is going on in this movie. Instead Clive Owen and Naomi Watts travel the world and witness a few crimes, talk a bit, pose some questions, and nothing is followed up until we all stop caring about it because the next important moment of the movie has already taken place. Tom Twyker shoots it all with a fancy panache that befits a world traveling movie. This is kind of like a boring version of a James Bond film and it truly is boring. There is actually only one significant action scene and it's at least a very a good one. It takes place in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC and out of nowhere glass is falling and blood is spurting but this happens towards the end of what feels like a three and a half hour movie (the sad thing is that it is only two hours). You actually want the movie to end, or you wish that James Bond would swing in and teach Clive Owen's character how to stop being dreary and put this film into gear so that we could witness something that will actually interest all of us. But no, Mr. Owen's character is just content to schedule interviews with insidious bankers (one of whom is played by the underrated Armin Mueller-Stahl) and we just have to sit back and wait for the boring talk about banking to be over. This movie is a bug-on-the-wall's worst nightmare where we see too much of everything that happens to the point that you'd rather watch something else.

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