The previews for this make it sounds like the banks are in your pocket, bugging your phones, using your PIN numbers for hostage negotiations, which of course sounds ridiculous. I am pleased to report that while the bank(s) in this movie aren’t doing anything remotely like that, they are doing some other equally un-banking-like, but even more ridiculous. The movie is not about what the bad guys are doing, however. It’s about how Clive Owen gets through his day alive to tell about it. Everything else is just a reason to be paranoid, however silly. Once you hear a line like “Interpol is not in the law-enforcement business,” you know someone forgot to do all their homework. It’s also clear that the movie was made before the Fall 2008 super-collapse of the economy and banking system. The idea of any bank having the resources to do what this screenplay implies is quite funny, actually, and may serve as a balm to those stressed out by our current economic crisis.
The ominous International Bank of Business and Credit is under investigation by Clive Owen, his worry-face clamped on good and tight. In a series of quite gut-wrenching sequences, Owen stumbles through an amazing array of awesome locations, occasionally crossing paths with Naomi Watts (no sparks fly, no time!) and a bunch of hooey being fed to us by the explainer-characters. The detective work they do is interesting and fun, involving actual brain work and not dues-ex-machina memories or lucky stumbles into a candlestick-lever. The actual plot that they unravel, well, it’s complicated, global, and as a premise utterly collapses with our early-2009 hindsight. Talk about toxic assets! If it was more political or more logically pecuniary, I could buy it, but instead it’s an inane mix of both. All that stuff is only secondary to the scene-by-scene action-adventure, though.
The Evil Shadow Organization’s schemes become more over-planned and kind of self-defeatist as they go along. Why would you frame your own sniper? He’s already the sniper! Even I have the expertise to avoid some of the basic errors that the otherwise hyper-meticulous IBBC manages to make. However, the locations are awesome and visually stimulating and the action sequences are effective. Every now and then you’ll watch a scene and then just as it ends you realize, hey, wait, how did they do that? I’d rent it again just for the making-of. The poster gives away that we’re going to end up in the Guggenheim museum one way or another, so it’s safe to spoil that the scenes in there were definitely worth the price of admission. The score is pretty great too.
See it for Owen’s trademarked thinking cap and glower, the Guggenheim, the score, and the smugness of knowing first-hand that banks are actually much, much stupider than any movie could ever predict. Check it out, it’s a fun time.
MPAA Rating R- violence and language
Release date 2/13/09
Time in minutes 118
Director Tom Tykwer
Studio Columbia Pictures