"The International" might be the most intelligent, frantically paced thriller ever made.
It's got all the action of movies like "Crank" and "Live Free or Die Hard" without the stupidity.
Clive Owen is an interesting creature in the acting world. Not every movie he's made has been a critical success, but every movie he's been in has at least been fun to watch, or in the case of "Children of Men," absolutely moving.
He fits his character in "The International" like a glove. He doesn't play a superhero. Indeed, his character finishes the film in a battered condition. He plays an almost annoyingly obsessive inspector working for Interpol, driven by the goal of taking down a large and evil bank, the International Bank of Business and Credit, which gives the film its name and sounds a little ridiculous.
The odd thing is that it seems like the filmmakers wanted the bank to sound a little ridiculous. They seem to be trying to evoke the feeling of the old Bond-movie villainous organizations, only instead of committing terrorism, the bad guys in "The International" merely fund it. Clive Owen's character - with Naomi Watts in tow - spends the movie traveling around the globe in pursuit of evidence of the bank's wrongdoing, going through Berlin, Paris, Milan, New York City and, finally, Istanbul.
The film has a strange build-up. It stays firmly in the territory of the intellectual's film, right until it gets to New York. Then it starts to go a little off the reservation. The best moment in the film is when Owen and some NYPD detectives tail an assassin to the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. Then the viewer gets hit with a 10-ton sledgehammer composed entirely of testosterone-fueled, adolescent joy. Owen and the assassin then proceed to have a gunfight with some generic henchmen - in the Guggenheim. They have Uzis. Hilarity ensues. It's amazing how well this scene slid into a movie that is otherwise high-brow. In fact, not only does it make sense in the context of the story; it actually sets up the film on a trajectory toward its highly satisfactory conclusion.
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It's been a while since thrillers like this were made, set in the present, with real-world evils and (almost) completely believable circumstances. It seems like these films died out for a while. The only exception in recent memory has been the Bourne films, and honestly, those are more of a vehicle to allow Matt Damon to play James Bond, rather than a genuine thriller.
"The International" is a good start on reviving the genre. To use another Owen film as an example, "Shoot 'Em Up" is a fine movie - entertaining from start to finish. There can be no argument there. But it doesn't make the ticket holder think. For that, we have films like "The International."
