The International

I’ve been impressed with the imagination and technical bravura of the three films I’ve seen by Tom Tykwer, the German writer/director: Run Lola Run (1999), The Princess and the Warrior (2000), and Heaven (2002). So when I found out that he had directed The International, I forgot the strong fughedaboutit feeling I had after seeing the unattributed theatrical trailer and zipped over to my local cineplex.

I’m not sorry I saw the film, but if I were Relativity Media, the production company of
record, I’d deep six it immediately. At least then The International would have the
distinction of being associated with other DOA films by talented directors such as Michael Cimino's Heaven’s Gate, Elaine May's Ishtar and Robert Altman's Quintet.

International feels like the love child of the Mission Impossible franchise and Erin Brockovitch, an action-packed, globe-trotting thriller which puts a stop to the ruthless, amoral, greed-grabbing schemes of impeccably dressed corporate bad guys, and brings them to justice. Here the bad guys (chief honcho played by the excellent Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen) are the financial elite. Seems they’ve grown bored with earning obscene profits on mortgages and their stealth derivatives.Now they are into selling game-changing military technology to third world insurgents. All they ask in return is to run the country’s economy. It’s a kind of customer service program. An economy,after all, is really too complicated and troublesome a thing for a government to manage very effectively, anyway. These things are always best left to trusted professionals. Sounds vaguely familiar. And, yeah, we could use a good movie about the sheriff bringing the law to the wild west of financial shenanigans. Especially since real life agents of justice don’t seem willing to pull the trigger. But The International just doesn’t get the job done. Oddly, the excellent cast, including an Interpol agent played by Clive Owen, a Manhattan Assistant DA played by Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl’s world-weary military affairs advisor, all seem to just miss being convincing in their roles. You have to wonder what happened to transform Tom Tykwer from an innovative, soulful maker of films to the guy responsible for this uninspired mess.

Maybe it's just being new in Hollywood. Big money means big pressure to generate return on investment. And that often means starting with a proven money making franchise concept like Mission Impossible or James Bond and just changing the bad guys and the locations. Perhaps Tom Tykwer fell into this trap. Same thing happened to Christopher Nolan, the British writer/director who made two vibrant, breathtakingly innovative films, Following (1998) and Momento (2000), before making it to Hollywood.

Watching his 2002 film, Insomnia, starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams, I kept waiting for flashes of his former genius but, alas, they were few. It didn’t seem like Nolan's movie. Why strap such creative talent into a formulaic harness when almost any director could produce the same work? To be fair, Nolan’s Dark Knight (2008) breathed new life into the Batman franchise, so maybe it just takes some time for foreign-born talent to find its American audience way and navigate through the Hollywood labyrinth. So maybe there is still hope that we’ll see more great, original films from the talented Mr. Tykwer. We need more of his original films which, unlike Nolan’s, are searching after something like truthfulness and integrity in a crazy, corrupt world.