International
Everyone has pretty much been clued in by now in the way that the old money families and banks of the world pretty much control everything that goes on in unfathomably imaginable ways, but the question really is, now that the average joes and jills of the world have at least a working knowledge of that fact, WHAT exactly can we actually do about it? It’s a question posed within this 2009 release, albeit buried underneath a hubris of a lumbering script and one superb action sequence. The film tells the story of one particular bank centered in the mega tiny European country of Luxembourg, which is involved in arms dealing for all kinds of conflicts and rebellions around the world, not to make a profit, but to maintain control of these military and revolutionary groups so as to control the balance of power in the world. Enter one Interpol agent (Clive Owen) and a mere NYC Deputy District Attorney (Naomi Watts) who catch onto the bank’s dealings and somehow someway hope to make a dent in the overall financial power structure, but the film itself suffers from poor writing and character development for its two leads as well as a tone that would have been better suited to be considerably darker in nature. Owen comes off as merely a guy having a VERY bad day, with seemingly little motivation or insight into what makes him tick outside of the fact that he is most definitely NOT any kind of a badass in his own right, while Watts seems to be looking none the worse for wear lately and is a far cry from the hot blonde fox she was early in her career, but at least she still retains enough charisma to make her portions of the movie watchable. We also get Armin Mueller-Stahl as the old operations manager of the bank, a guy whom we are told was once a devout Communist, but whose reasons for now being a warrior for pure evil capitalism are reduced to some philosophical gobbledy-gook in an interrogation scene between him and Owen. Worse, the head of the bank itself as played by Ulrich Thomsen is essayed as an almost even-tempered, reasonable guy, with absolutely no hints of the true dark nature of his work ever shining through, thus making the character an absolute bore. The movie consists of our two heroes trying to follow up leads through a series of incidents trying to make something stick to the bank (including the assassination of a Italian politician), but in many ways seems to go nowhere until suddenly, at the two thirds mark, we are treated out of nowhere to an all out, balls to the walls shootout taking place in New York’s famed Guggenheim museum, a wild (if unrealistic) sequence chock full of bloody bullet squibs, pandemonium, and valuable works of art being utterly destroyed, not to mention the museum itself. As said though, outside of that very lively sequence the movie just kind of plods along in a way that can best be described as deliriously boring, with the most random plot events (oh look, there’s Naomi Watts being run down by a car) trying its best to keep the viewer invested in the story but not really succeeding. In the end, it would seem that the only way the good guys could win would probably be to just drop a nuke on Luxembourg (only one would be needed), but the script comes up with a convoluted way to resolve everything by setting up a pseudo final showdown between Owen and Thomsen on the rooftops of Turkey. Overall, a movie that tries and fails because it refuses to go deeper into the possible truth outside of the blithe moral message that “bankers are evil”…
5/10