There’s lots to like about The International. Great locations (Italy, Germany, Turkey, the U.S.), a fantastic shoot-out in The Guggenheim Museum, rivaled only by a foot chase through Istanbul’s main market area, Clive glowering, Naomi Watts pretty much holding her own as well. And the basic story is pretty gripping, too, as stories built around the world of shady financial dealings go. The problem is that the gripping parts come in between long stretches where very little happens.
The bad guy in The International is a bank. A very large, very powerful bank that kills those that get in its way and that doesn’t really care about the pedigree of its clients. Louis Salinger (Owen) is an Interpol agent who has been working on this case for some time, back to when he was with Scotland Yard. There, the informant he thought was going to break the case open ended up dead, killed in a car “accident” along with the man’s wife and children. As The International opens, another potential breakthrough goes south when an American agent working on the case is murdered just after meeting with an informant. The informant ends up dead, too. Salinger is there when the agent is killed, waiting to find out what he’s been told.
The American agent was working with a New York district attorney, Eleanor Whitman (Watts). Whitman and Salinger team up to try and figure out what’s happening, but others they talk to end up dead, too, including a high-profile Italian politician who was resisting working with the bank. (Not good to get on the bad side of Italians, at least, not this guy’s relatives … bad move by the bank.)
Salinger and Whitman keep running into brick walls, on both sides – the bank has a long reach, and it’s obvious that even their own bosses aren’t necessarily keen to see the bank taken down. This ultimately leads the action to New York, and that shootout in the Guggenheim. The set-up for the confrontation is great, and the action itself is terrific. At that point, the overall pace of the movie really picks up and carries through to the end. If only it hadn’t taken so long to get there.
The acting is fine across the board; Armin Mueller-Stahl is particularly strong as an aging warrior working for the bank. Director Tom Tykwer takes too much time in set-up for me, but his meticulous action sequences do work very well. As noted above, the locations are frequently breath-taking.
There are a number of special features on the Blu-ray. One focuses on those locations, especially the decisions related to architecture. Another breaks down in detail how the Guggenheim scene was done, although, if you watch the making-of featurette first (it’s placed earlier on the disc), you’ll have seen a lot of that already. There’s a commentary track with Tykwer and writer Eric Singer. There’s also an extended scene that casts the relationship between Salinger and Whitman in a very different light than in the film, and that reveals much more about Salinger personally than what we get to see in the final cut. I like the character better for having watched that scene.
The film itself is in 1080p high def, with TrueHD 5.1 Dolby English and French options and Dolby 5.1 Spanish and Portuguese. Subtitle options for the film are English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The special features are a mix of high def and standard def, with English stereo audio and Spanish and Portuguese subtitle options. (Guess they figured the French wouldn’t care about the special features.)