from my PBT.
I love conspiracy films and hate investment bankers, so this seemed appealing. What I got was a slick, well-made action/thriller that unfortunately resulted to some of the most clichéd, formulaic tropes imaginable. Clive Owen is adequate, I guess, playing 'the investigator who doesn't play by the rules'. Naomi Watts is the 'sympathetic, attractive colleague' and there's numerous heavily-accented baddies. At least I was spared any of Owen's character's personal drama, as the film eschewed any family/emotional stuff in favor of making him single-minded and one dimensional. This was a good thing; more time for boring chase scenes. In addition to many scenes and dialogue taken straight from an episode of CSI, we also get 'the assassin with the telltale deformity'. However, despite my griping I'll say that the long shoot-out scene set in the Guggenheim is one of the most dazzling action sequences of recent cinematic memory and definitely the high point of the film - it was a distraction from the muddy political plot at the core. Towards the end the film finally gets some guts and raises some decent questions. I'm glad this film questions the futility of attempting 'justice' (or even defining the term, really) within the structures of capitalism though it's critique falls far short of something like The Wire. Of course, The Wire has over 60 hours to explore these themes while The International relegates them to a 5-minute speech by a minor character. This compression makes it feel like the fil has borrowed it's philosophy (or maybe just it's heavy-handedness) from The Dark Knight. It's kind of amazing that this film came out in the midst of a huge investment banking crisis/scandal, as these once-ignored puppetmasters are now the recipients of much derision from "average Americans", so this should be successful (if anyone pays attention to it). Even better is the current public debate about torture, which also applies to this film - not directly, as there is no torture in the film, but indirectly through the idea of having to sacrifice your own beliefs and values in order to achieve something, which the Bush administration was more than happy to do. The film's denouement is set on a rooftop landscape in Istanbul, and it's easy to ignore the cop-out Hollywood morality because the photography is so stunning. The closing credits suggest that good can triumph over evil, and I would expect nothing less from a product of the same system the film is (sort of) critiquing. Overall I found this to be a good two hours of entertainment and I will again mention the amazing action sequence in the Guggenheim; but when compared to a truly masterful film in the same genre, such as The Constant Gardener, I can only think about The International's many flaws.