'International' largely bankrupt as thriller

In Tom Tykwer's functional yet uninspired European thriller, "The International" refers to a giant bank based in Luxembourg called the IBBC which has supplanted the mob, the KGB and even James Bond's arch-nemesis SPECTER as the movies' most feared and deadly organization of ultimate villainy.

This accidentally prescient movie, which plays right into the public's current view of corrupt financial institutions as something akin to unabated evil, has the IBBC involved in all sorts of illegal and immoral shenanigans from money laundering to brokering secret arms deals with unstable nations.

An INTERPOL agent named Louis Salinger has been wise to the IBBC for a long time. Salinger is played by Clive Owen, reportedly one of the actors who was on the shortlist to become the next Agent 007 after Pierce Brosnan.

Here, Owen's INTERPOL agent is another of the unkempt, instinct-driven, reluctant heroes the actor's played in "Children of Men," "Shoot 'em Up" and "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead."

As a savvy investigator chasing extremely smart financial crooks, Salinger might have been a more textured character had he been a meticulously detailed fussbudget with a championship chess player's grasp of strategy and Q's command of cutting-edge technology. Salinger merely looks like TV's Lt. Columbo with the rumpled raincoat.

Salinger is convinced that a fatal heart attack suffered by his partner in Berlin was an assassination, just as they were about to get a senior member of the IBBC team to give them the goods on a secret weapons deal with the Chinese.

On one IBBC case, Salinger has teamed up with New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman, played by an underwhelming Naomi Watts, acting as if she were in rehearsal mode for some other better-written role.

Whitman is married with children, and the obvious cliché would be an illicit romance between her and Salinger. Wisely, "The International" sidesteps this convention, but offers nothing in its place.

Salinger and Whitman get a break when a seemingly unrelated assassination of an Italian businessman yields an odd footprint that forensic investigators cleverly trace to the likely hit man, a cold, methodical professional known only as The Consultant (Brian F. O'Byrne).

This takes Salinger to Whitman's turf of New York, where the movie's overdone action set piece - a lengthy, wild west shootout at the Guggenheim Museum - turns the Frank Lloyd Wright structure (actually a replica built on a Berlin soundstage) into a project for ABC-TV's "Extreme Makeover."

The sequence also suggests New York cops take several months to answer a crime-in-progress call.

Veteran character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl brings world-weary pragmatism to an IBBC associate named Wexler, an avowed communist whose cancer forces him to consider an alliance with Salinger.

How more intriguing "The International" would have been had the story concentrated on Wexler's conscience-conflicted villain instead of Salinger's blissfully listless hero.

"The International"

Rating: 2½ stars

Starring: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O'Byrne

Directed by: Tom Tykwer

Other: Columbia Pictures release. Rated R for violence, language. 118 minutes