The International

WITH propitious timing, bankers are the villains in The International, a tepid thriller that gets just about everything else wrong. It's such a stolidly conventional effort that one could call it old-fashioned, but that would denigrate its many superior genre predecessors.

The yarn is formed as a globetrotting adventure in which every location is captioned (Berlin, Lyon, New York, Luxembourg, Milan, Istanbul) as its world-weary would-be hero goes to extremes of carbon footprint excess. Louis Salinger is a sad-eyed, dishevelled and remarkably intuitive Interpol agent who is so intense that he immerses his face in a sink full of ice cubes. He is played by a consistently grim and glowering Clive Owen.

Lou is, we are alerted in several ominous references, a man with a dark past in his days at Scotland Yard. “You can’t crash and burn like two years ago,” archly warns a concerned New York assistant district attorney, played by Naomi Watts in a role so underwritten that she barely registers as a character.

The inanely convoluted plotline revolves around the powerful Luxembourg-based International Bank of Business and Credit, which is steeped in secretive shady dealings. Its chairman is named Umberto Calvini, which is perhaps a nudging reminder of Roberto Calvi, the chairman of the largest private bank in Italy, who was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982.

Eric Warren Singer’s trite screenplay is constructed as a thriller, even though it is devoid

of tension. It's directed by Tom Tykwer, who demonstrated such impressive flair for kinetic energy with his breakthrough picture, Run Lola Run(1998). But the closest we get to an action sequence in the first 45 minutes of The Internationalcomes when a man vomits and keels over.

Tykwer later goes wildly over the top with a preposterous, self-consciously stylish sequence in which New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and its video installations provide the backdrop for an over- extended shoot-out.

Heavily influenced by the accomplished Jason Bourne trilogy starring Matt Damon, The Internationalhas been made with more money than sense. It's so dull and witless that it could be retitled Bourne to Be Mild.

Directed by Tom Tykwer. Starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ulrich Thomsen, Brian F O'Byrne 15A cert, gen release, 118 min★