Assassinating the Guggenheim

The problem with the new financial services thriller, "The International," is not that it makes absolutely no sense, but that it doesn’t have any color and isn’t nearly as fun as it should be.

Clive Owen and Naomi Watts play a pair of investigators improbably named Salinger and Whitman who, when the movie opens, are looking into the lending practices of The International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC).

The last guy who asked to take a look at the IBBC’s books dropped dead of a sudden heart attack. The guy before him disappeared on his way to work.

Sounds suspicious, right? How can we be sure that the bank is evil? The answer is: Because its shareholders meet in one of those sleek, steel blue Euro towers that are the preferred hideaways for three out of three Bond villains.

Owens and Watts piece together the case, slower than you’d like them to. The film’s director, Tom Tykwer, who started off with the pop caper "Run, Lola, Run" in 1998, contracts and expands the plot as the two move from Milan, to New York, to Istanbul, picking up leads and, just as quickly, losing them.

It turns out the IBBC is happily trampling over international law in a bid to sell small arms and will not rest until compliant world leaders (an African dictator; the future prime minister of Italy) sign on the dotted line.

Owen gives an angry, rumpled performance.

As for Watts, one feels

cheated to learn that Whitman is a lawyer working for the New York district attorney’s office. Doesn’t that job belong to — you know — "Law and Order" ’s Jack McCoy? Just asking.

Admittedly, it’s an awful part, which calls for little more than yelling into a blackberry and biting one’s lower lip.

They do not kiss. Rumor has it that the Watts’ character is married. If I remember correctly, a husband does appear in one scene, says a few words, turns around, and walks out.

The one moment when "The International" comes alive is a blast-happy scene set in a full-scale mockup of The Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The bankers have sent a team of hitmen to the museum to murder another hitman now in Clive Owen’s custody. Around and around the ramp they go, spraying Uzi ammunition into the credibly bad art installations. Ten minutes go by. The museum is wrecked, more or less. It is the most scathing art review since Ruskin took on Whistler.

Given the nature of the material, you would expect the movie to have some element of financial service satire. What makes "The International" such a disappointment is that it takes a perfectly fine premise (i.e. many bankers are crooks; financial institutions are rigged; let’s put Clive Owen in charge of the bailout) and doesn’t develop it.

That’s a shame because audiences appreciate timeliness in movies that are otherwise terrible. The American people demand an epic for our current recession. If

they’re smart, the studios will deliver. By mid-2010, expect every Hollywood movie not based on a comic-book franchise to feature either a banker, a real estate developer, or an ethics-challenged Florida congressman as the villain, with Katherine Heigl, our most promising young star, in the lead. If they’re really smart, the studios will figure out a way to fit all four in the same picture. That movie would make the magic billion dollars.