The International

--SPOILER ALERT--Caught in a racheting come-along of corrupt and criminal realities, Interpol Agent Lou Salinger (Clive Owen) is taken to his breaking point. He's been fiercely living inside the law, despite watching innocent people die as they got close to exposing the criminal operations of the International Bank of Business and Credit--the IBBC. He's been fiercely living under the law, despite his investigations being undermined by unexplained forces and despite his character being officially and wrongfully smeared.The film opens with the death of investigative colleague Tommy Shumer, hit in broad daylight in Berlin with an injection of a poison cocktail that drops him in a minute and then disappears out of his system.The come-along ratchets Salinger into a conference with Berlin police officials, who work from an initial coroner's finding of death by heart attack, into Salinger's dossier at Scotland Yard--which smears him for mishandling an IBBC investigation before dismissal from the Yard. The German officials will require more than "unsubstantiated theories" before there's any police action against the IBBC in Germany.The IBBC bad guys--executives and their slick legal council, Martin White (Patrick Baladi)--are smuggly moving to cause a bloody revolution in an African nation and Middle East warfare from their headquarters in Luxembourg. They're riding high on the debt that the conflicts will generate. Lou Salinger and his task-force teammate, Manhattan ADA Eleanor Whitman (Namoi Watts) must seem like the least of their problems.Tommy Shumer was killed just after first contact with an IBBC insider who initially would not give the invesigators his name. However, Salinger knows from his previous experience with the IBBC that the insider's life is forfeit.Salinger combs through news reports of recent deaths and finds the insider. He is André Clement--the bank's senior VP in charge of acquisitions.As the come-along ratchets Clement's death past a lie by bank chairman Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen), stonewalled and covered up in Salinger's presence by legal council Martin White and a French Gendarmerie official, ADA Whitman makes contact with Clement's widow. The shaken widow, with two young children to protect, directs the investigators to Italian Prime Minister hopeful, Umberto Calvini (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi).Calvini--a tall, broad-shouldered man of rare presence--is the lynch-pin that will bring the IBBC's Skarssen to a strange sort of two-step vigilante justice and family retribution. André Clement was Calvini's trusted friend. To aid the investigators, Calvini describes the bank's purchase of billions of dollars worth of missiles which need guidance systems that only his company and one other--in Turkey--can build and sell to the bank. He will not sell, now that his friend has been murdered. He clearly suspects the bank's culpability.Unfortunately, Skarssen's justice can't happen until Calvini is murdered by a double sniper scheme laid on by the IBBC--minutes after Salinger and Whitman talk to him.In the immediate aftermath of the Calvini murder, Salinger and Whitman identify the bank's assassin and, with two NYPD detectives helping, run him and his IBBC handler to ground at NYC's Guggenheim.The bank executives have noticed that Salinger is onto their assassin. They order the handler, the elderly former Stasi Colonel, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl), to "sever all ties with their consultant". Wexler orders the hit at the Guggenheim. He puts serveral shooters into play, and true to his prediction, taking out the assassin gets messy.The shootout at the Guggenheim is spectacular.Salinger survives, as does one of the two NYPD detectives. The bank's assassin, after a courageous and expertly executed fight, dies of his wounds.The surviving detective, who followed the handler out of the Guggenheim before the shooting started, has nabbed Wexler and taken him to an unofficial interrogation room. ADA Whitman has scored a CIA "Intelligence Report Excerpt" on Wilhelm Wexler and has turned it over to Salinger. Whitman makes sure that Salinger has time to read the CIA material before he interrogates Wexler.The CIA document allows Salinger to understand that communism-believer Wexler must surely be disaffected by his work for the nazified bank. Wexler truely is. He's had just about all of himself that he can take. But during the interrogation, Wexler drops the bombshell that changes Salinger's life forever.Salinger has demanded that Skarssen must be brought to justice and that Wexler must help.With educated and slowly delivered words in his pleasant, mild German accent, Wexler responds, "...your idea of justice is an illusion. Don't you understand, the very system you serve and protect will never allow anything to happen to Skarssen or the bank? On the contrary, the system guarantees the IBBC's safety, because everyone is involved. ... Hezbollah. CIA. The Columbian racketeers. Russian organized crime. Governments of Iran, Germany, China--and your government. Every multinational corporation everywhere. They all need banks like the IBBC so they can operate within the black and gray latitudes. And this is why your investigative efforts have either been ignored or undermined--and why you and I will be quietly disposed of before any case against the bank ever reaches a court of law. You understand, if you really want to stop the IBBC, you won't be able to do it within the boundaries of your system of justice. You will have to go outside. Once you do, there will always be collateral damage. Yes, you can sacrifice your own ideals for the greater good. That's a difficult choice--one I understand all too well. ...""The greater good" has resonance in all vigilante stories, from Robin Hood to Lou Salinger. This is a leading reason why good men and women go outside the law for justice. It's why Salinger cuts his ties with ADA Whitman, turning outlaw officially, and leaving Whitman clean for a later investigation of the IBBC. It's why Salinger will help Wexler to his redemption by trapping the IBBC's need for missle guidance systems against public disclosure that the missles are useless against the Israelis, who already have the guidance system counter-measures from the Turkish manufacturer. The trap will leave the bank without buyers for the missles on which they've spent billions--and, if it works, it will break the bank.The greater good is why Salinger will tell the Calvini brothers, unwise sons of the murdered Umberto, the whole story of the IBBC. It will hold up a mirror to the sons' guilt in their father's death. If they hadn't flashed their willingness to sell the guidance systems to the IBBC, their father might still be alive.Salinger will collect a slight reward when the Calvini brothers disappear the bank's legal slickster, Martin White, into a mountain side of rock--the first collateral damage of Salinger's actions. But the greater good is also why Salinger will unintentionally pull Wexler along to his collateral damage death in trying to slam the guidance systems trap shut. It's why he will face Skarssen on a Constantinople rooftop walkway, aggressively point Wexler's 9mm pistol at Skarssen's face, and shout, "I want some fxxxing justice".Salinger's first-step vigilante shot into Skarssen's chest does not kill him, but it tumbles him off his feet. The second step is left to a Calvini-family-employed assassin, who looks very much like he's done this before. After disarming Salinger of Wexler's Czech-made CZ-75, the elderly, balding, well-dressed man walks down to Skarssen."With compliments of Enzo and Mario Calvini", he says--in Italian, translated to English on the screen--before his chrome Browning HP blasts Skarssen's eyes closed forever. He walks back up the short flight of stairs, and as he passes Salinger on the roof-peak walkway, he says, "Thank you", in Italian. "Grazi". He keeps Wexler's pistol. Evidence in the Skarssen murder has been removed from Salinger by the Calvini rep.The film ends in a melding of newspaper reports showing that the IBBC survived Skarssen's death. The Wexler trap didn't work, and Syria is testing the missles that seemingly threaten Israel--the guidance system counter-measures apparently still secretly held by Israel.The clippings show that ADA Whitman has lined up her killer investigation, this one in the US Senate--one of the most global-corruption-ridden institutions on the planet.The worldwide system of corruption that protected the IBBC through its murderous and debt-grabbing operations under Skarssen has not even hiccuped. It will simply wallow on, protecting the global systemic corruption by the superrich, as Skarssen predicted.Will it take vigilantism on a massive, global scale to collapse the corruption system? There's a sequel in there.The newspaper reporters don't pursue Salinger.--spib, 15 Dec 2011.

It is amazing how many reviewers here either didn't get this movie, or wish to rewrite it according to their own tastes.One complains, for example, that to be effective in this day the international bank involved should have been Lehman Brothers, as if he expected someone to write a good thriller about bundled mortgage securities! He fails to understand, apparently, that this movie is about a totally different global identity in existence today, the far more shadowy international bank that, as is said in the movie, the world's major nations will always need for money laundering, bribes, third world revolutionary support and weapons transactions. This is the subject behind this movie, and a valid one it of course is.Another reviewer professes confusion re the Clive Owen line in the movie about one sometimes meeting his destiny on the road one takes to avoid it. It was certainly clear, and reasonably eloquent as the Muller-Stahl character states, to me. In the context it was given, Owen was saying that the Muller-Stahl figure, a dedicated, 30 year hard-line Commie who with the collapse of that ideology in the early 90's had sold out to the capitalist system it was attacking, had now the chance to find some purpose to his life by using the very position he had taken in the corrupt, capitalist bank in question. In his accepting a path that allowed him to avoid trying to meet the original purpose of his life, he is now confronted with the opportunity to meet that very destiny he desired through supporting Owen in helping to defeat one of the more egregious symbols of that system.Owen does an excellent job in portraying a character who refuses to take that other road and give up his own, daunting purpose to bring down the bank he was originally assigned to do as a British operative. He is teamed with Watts, a New York-based Federal prosecutor, who's own role is just as dedicated if somewhat less detailed. There are the usual hard to swallow coincidences - the assassin the bank uses just happens to live in New York - and situations bordering on disbelief - why on earth would the bank's lead villain, already knowing that his chief lawyer-in-conspiracy has apparently been offed, allow himself to meet with a chief rival without an ample bodyguard? But the film more than makes up for these shortcomings by its intelligence, its topicality, and its visual excitement having to do with the capitalist world's 'power' architecture, though to include the Guggenheim Museum designed by the primarily Jeffersonian, anti-capitalist Frank Lloyd Wright, is a decided contradiction. Nevertheless, the gun fight scene that takes place so excitingly and shatteringly in that building can be said to be symbolic of how the modern global system has destroyed such earlier, more individualistic and pastoral ideologies.All in all one of the best international thrillers offered this decade, and worthy of at least 4 stars!

A ripping yarn with an absolutely astonishing set piece - a shoot-out in Guggenheim Museum New York! Clive Owen rather intense in his part and a little annoying but a story, based on truth, well told and immaculately filmed across many cities. Iconic modern architecture is the other star, worth viewing for the fabulously opulent buildings alone. Worth watching the extra featuring how they filmed the Guggenheim Museum sequence.

I love the story line and as I have been in lockdown since March 2020 a new video is always welcome, I cannot get out to the cinema so it’s the next best thing

Disappointingly average.

Fairly fast flowing story, not bad acting.

Luckily I watched this film at the cinema before I purchased the dvd so I knew what to expect. Beautiful filmed and Clive Owen is on good form. The box shows the only real gun scene so unknown viewers may not realise this film's political thriller type character. Recommended nonetheless!