This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Move over Darth Vader. Get out of the way Hannibal Lector. Take your pink slip and go Joker. There’s a new villain in town: the evil bank. Timing is everything, and whether through luck or prescience, The International capitalizes on employing bad guys squarely in the crosshairs of American fury and bitterness. This seemingly surefire recipe for box-office success is squandered, however, on a thriller that, quite simply, forgets to be thrilling.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) has been on the trail of a corrupt bank for years. The former Scotland Yard investigator is now pushing pencils for Interpol but his mission remains the same — take down the International Bank of Business and Credit (or IBBC for short), which he is convinced is involved in arms trading and massive money laundering for organized crime. Disheveled and on the edge, Salinger has made IBBC’s demise his passion in life to the exclusion of family, relationships and even personal hygiene. Yet every time Salinger gets close to breaking the case, his witnesses end up dead, victims of convenient freak accidents.

Joining him in his quest — for reasons not convincingly spelled out — is New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts). Together they follow the money trail from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul. IBBC has its tentacles in every country’s government, allowing it to easily control the mechanisms of power that will legitimate its actions. When that doesn’t work, hit men (Brian F. O’Byrne) are tasked with eliminating anyone who gets in the bank’s way, from turncoats in the organization to presumptive heads of state. As it turns out, IBBC more than just finances the world’s war machines: “They don’t want to control the conflict,” one character states. “They want to control the debt that comes after the conflict.” Soon IBBC will own the world.

The closer Salinger and Whitman get to uncovering the truth, the more danger they find themselves in. And if they want to take down the IBBC, they are going to have to go outside the traditional avenues of justice to do it. To do good, they’ll have to get their hands very dirty.

The International is the worst kind of thriller. It spends two hours making you think you’re watching an elaborate, multi-layered, complex story only to be exposed, in the end, as transparent and straightforward. Worse, The International doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. For most of its leaden 118 minutes, it is a suspense thriller. But nearly an hour and a half into its running time, the film tries its hand at being an action film. It succeeds as neither — the thriller is nearly devoid of suspense and the action is too little too late. You can be Michael Clayton or you can be The Bourne Ultimatum, but apparently you cannot be both.

The razzle-dazzle showpiece of the film takes place at Manhattan’s Guggenheim. After treating us to a lecture on the necessity for complete discretion, IBBC sends a small army of Uzi-wielding assassins to kill Salinger in broad daylight in the (conveniently sparsely populated) museum. Very subtle indeed. Fifteen minutes later, the landmark’s spiral rotunda and the art installations that surround it are converted into Swiss cheese. The explosive scene doesn’t entirely work, but it does give the film a much-needed jumpstart to carry it through to its unsatisfying and crude denouement.

Some may appreciate The International’s “how the world really works” premise, but the film, which admittedly was made before America’s current economic crisis began, is unable to capitalize on the zeitgeist. True, the debonair, haughty European bankers make for an easy and opportune target, but the now exposed ineptitude of the true life characters may undermine the film’s premise of an unstoppable bank pulling political puppet strings.

Others will simply be turned off by the movie’s muddled plot, tepid pacing and ambiguous, unlikely third act. After two hours of telling us the IBBC is too monolithic, pervasive and all-powerful to stop, The International expects us to believe that one crusading vigilante and the loss of a single client would be their undoing. The International was penned by a first-time screenwriter and it shows.

Giving us meaty characters in which to invest ourselves would have gone a long way to improving the situation. However, Owen and Watts have absolutely zero charisma. While Owen throws himself into his role with passionate if languid gusto, Watts is just plain awful. Normally a competent actress, she forgets everything she ever learned in acting class, delivering her barely functional lines inert time and again.

It’s been a long time since German director Tom Tykwer made the kinetic and creative Run Lola Run. And with each successive movie he’s put his stamp on, it becomes increasingly clear that the success of that early effort was a fluke, rather than a clarion call heralding a new and exciting cinematic talent. Tykwer is a capable — and at times inspired — filmmaker, to be certain, and knows how to fill the globetrotting screen with slick, glossy images of carefully selected location eye candy. But he never manages to invest this paranoid thriller with the very thing it needed most — paranoia. Parallax View this is not. If there’s one thing a film of this nature cannot afford, it’s arriving on screen stillborn.

At one point in The International, after Salinger has managed to bag one of the baddies, he learns the difference between truth and fiction. “Fiction,” he is told, “has to make sense.” Not so. This movie is a work of fiction and it makes no sense whatsoever.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.