Breaking the bank - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Breaking the bank

What’s the nastiest movie villain you can conjure up these days? Muslim terrorists? Colombian druglords? Asian white slavers? The Russian mafia? African illegal arms dealers?

You’re not thinking nasty enough. No, for these edgy times, the villains who strike the most fear in our hearts are ... banks.

And not just any banks, but the kind of sprawling global octopi whose amoral leaders have their greasy tentacles in so many pies that the world’s governments not only can’t stop them, they can’t afford to let them fail.

The eponymous bank of “The International” — full name: International Bank of Business and Credit — is one such institution. But despite its bland name, the IBBC, based in Luxembourg with a major financial outpost in New York City, is anything but innocuous.

Long a money-laundering front for organized crime, it’s now branching out into big-time arms trading — not for profits on the weapons, but for the opportunity to control the debt that swiftly accumulates from the conflicts sparked by weapons. As anyone with a mortgage knows, debt makes slaves of us all.

Clive Owen is Louis Salinger, an obsessed Interpol agent who has been trying to crack the IBBC for several years — without success, since anyone who poses a threat ends up dying or disappearing.

Salinger’s early efforts to go at the IBBC got him bounced from Scotland Yard when he developed an inside informant who was subsequently murdered, along with his wife and children.

Now he’s at it anew, with the aid of a Manhattan assistant district attorney (Naomi Watts), but with dwindling support from his own bosses as people keep dying or vanishing in his wake.

As befits this kind of thriller, the plot zips from Berlin to New York to Milan to Luxembourg to Paris to Brussels to Istanbul, with fine turns by Armin Mueller-Stahl as IBBC’s chief of security and Brian F. O’Byrne as its top hitman.

The highlight is a wild shootout between Salinger and a few allies and what seems to be a platoon of IBBC goons inside New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which ranks as one of the best movie firefights in recent memory.

Some plot contrivances will induce eye-rolling. O’Byrne’s hitman wears a leg brace and a special shoe that makes a unique footprint because it’s made by only one company and fitted by only one doctor. And in the Guggenheim shootout, it takes the NYPD half of forever to respond to the scene.

Still, Owen is suitably intense, flashing a great glare — not as good as Samuel L. Jackson’s, but right up there — and he and Watts make an appealing good-guy team.

From its deadly beginning to a penultimate chase through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar on the way to its violent rooftop finale, “The International” is built to stoke our gnawing anxiety about the big, shadowy financial conglomerates that seem accountable to no one but themselves.