WHEN officials of a corrupt European bank in Tom Tykwer’s thriller “The Interna tional” decide to eliminate their in-house assassin with a hit squad (lest he turn criminal informant), someone hilariously warns, “This could get messy.”
Truer words have rarely been spoken. For reasons known only to screenwriter Eric Warren Singer, they order the rub-out in the middle of the Guggenheim Museum during business hours.
It leaves lots of holes in the visitors and the concrete ramps, not to mention the filmed art installations.
This preposterous 14-minute sequence – capped by the inevitable falling chandelier – is actually the high point of this remarkably dull thriller.
Mostly, it’s a procession of eyeball-glazing, head-scratching speeches and aphorisms (“sometimes the best way to find your destiny is on the path to avoiding it”) only occasionally punctuated by the odd assassination of an Italian politician.
An updated riff on “Three Days of the Condor” with ruthless international bankers might sound timely, but as the movie’s chief aphorism dispenser – a former Stasi agent played by Armin Mueller-Stahl – so well puts it, “Fiction has to make sense.”
I spent much of the movie trying to figure out why the bank would hire a “consultant” (Brian F. O’Byrne) – with an easy-to-trace leg brace yet – to do all its assassinations. Let’s hope he got a nice 401(k).
And just why is naive
Interpol-agent-with-a-past Clive Owen working with Naomi Watts, dubiously cast as a Manhattan assistant DA?
Watts, who holds her trademark waterworks mostly in check for once, has little to do but argue with her bosses and marvel at Owen’s dimpled 12 o’clock shadow and apparent disinclination for hygiene.
The movie meanders around the world without rhyme or reason until it gets to Turkey. There, an anticlimactic rooftop chase reminds us that Tykwer, the German director who reinvented the Euro thriller with “Run, Lola, Run” a decade ago, has been far surpassed by Paul Greengrass and the Bourne adventures.
“The International,” which centers on a convoluted arms-supply plot, is one of those movies sponsored by an international conglomerate that lectures us about how all international conglomerates are corrupt.
This got me thinking: Exactly how much did Sony’s shareholders have to pay for that beautiful, full-scale mockup of the Guggenheim they built in Berlin? Are they going to ask for a federal bailout, too?
THE INTERNATIONAL
Kill the bankers.
Running time: 118 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity). At the Empire, the Chelsea, the Village East, others.