the international

So I saw The International last night. Clive Owens, right? Usually equals a great movie. Arthur. Great movie. Derailed. Great movie. So I was actually pretty excited to go see it, if not for that it looked like it might be good all by itself.

So the movie opens with two guys, Clement and Schumer, in a nice car. You know the whole 'meet the anonymous insider' kind of thing. They don't really seem to get anything done, or maybe I just missed it. Because, usually, when they show a meeting, they swap packages or info or something. I guess they decided to show us one of the earlier meetings in those kinds of things, I don't know. What happens next is kind of cool, though. Schumer (Burfield) leaves Clement (Bigot) in the car and makes his way toward Salinger (Owens). At this point, I noticed the guy walk behind him, and a little 'thwp' noise, but I think I would have to go back and watch it again to see if that was really the movie or not. Schumer throws up his innerds, clamps onto his arm and falls over. This part comes up later, because apparently Salinger knows the signs of a certain kind of poisoning. Later in the film he freaks out a little because he thinks the same thing happens to him, which might have been cool for plot reasons, but it is really just him being paranoid. Anyway, he and Whitman (Watts) go on the goose chase to try and come up with hard evidence that the IBBC is a big bad bank that wants to control the weapons market and put down a few annoying people on the way. Of course, the characters don't seem to have ever seen movies before, as it's pretty clear that a bank like that has it's dirty little fingers dipped in every organization and government from here to Pluto.

So they track down Calvini (Barbareschi), a politician from Italy who's running for some government position or other, and of course he is more than willing to help them out ... until some idiot goes and assassinates him. You pretty much know this is going to happen, I mean they have all of the security looking around and there are the frenzied shots of the speaker and the crowd going wild and all - it's imminent. So yeah, assassination, and Salinger and Whitman end up chasing down one of the snipers, who of course gets away. There seems to be a little bit of discontinuity there since it seems the driver turns one way and Salinger somehow ends up ahead of him, but again, I'd have to go back and watch it again. Things happen and time passes a little, and they end up in New York, chasing down their assassin, played by O'Bryne, but I can't remember his name in the movie. They come across a few names, but IMDB names him The Consultant, which I think is ridiculous seeing as they actually do name him in the movie ...

Anyway, they track 'The Consultant' down to one spot in NY, and then happen to see him walk by and follow him to the Guggenheim. Now this is about the only part where I forgot I was watching a movie. This was the part that was cool and had your blood pumping and got you to jump in your seat a few times. Oh, and if you aren't that awesome with blood, be careful because there are a few parts that are just like >gah<. Especially the part where Salinger shoves his thumb into some guy's bullet wound. I got just enough of that to make me gag before I shut my eyes. But that's just me.

After this, well ... everything sort of just goes downhill. It's seriously a botchy job. Salinger gets to interview Wexler (Mueller-Stahl) and then goes off to hunt down Skarssen (Thomsen), and yeah it's not even interesting enough to recount in general detail. All in all, they could have done a much better job. The movie kinda crashed, and it was a huge disappointment. I felt like, even though The International was about two hours long, it still had about two or three more hours before it wrapped up into a sufficient story. Oh, and at the end, when it blacks out and you're like ... where's the rest, and then they put up the 'directed by' and all of those titles, they show you news paper articles that are sort of supposed to complete the story. I know they did that in 27 Dresses, and it was really a cute idea. But see, 27 Dresses finished their story. So they were allowed to do that. The International does it more as a 'here, you finish it and we'll save a few bucks'. Kind of sad.

I'm not blaming Owens. Or any of the actors really, though I've never really been a fan of Naomi Watts. The acting was good. It was believable, which is the first step to good acting, I think. The cinematography was good, camera angles, all of that. It's just the plot. The plot could have been good. But in its final form, it just sucked. Sadly. Because I had pretty high hopes. With all that said, this is one of those movies that you don't go see in theatres, you don't buy, and you don't even rent. You wait till a friend rents it and borrow it from them. Rent something else if you want to see something worth spending your money on.