DVD Review: The International

This convoluted but crowd-pleasing thriller plays off recent headlines but has a pleasantly retro feel. It seems more akin to such ’70s spy melodramas as Three Days of the Condor rather than the current crop of Bond and Bourne romps. Clive Owen plays a scruffy Interpol agent who teams with Manhattan assistant DA Naomi Watts to bring down an international bank, which is supplementing its usual investments with profits from gun-running and illegally obtained contracts granted by third-world dictators. Director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) stages key sequences all over the world—thereby treating audiences to crisply lensed views of gorgeous locations—but saves his action set piece for New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, the scene of a breathtaking, 14-minute shootout. Those looking for slick entertainment won’t be disappointed, as long as they don’t expect the picture to make perfect sense.

Shelf Talk: There couldn’t possibly be a better time to market a movie featuring big bankers as villains, so now is the time to ride the current wave of populist outrage. Hopefully, Owen’s recent theatrical offering, Duplicity, will be hitting store shelves while International is still making the rounds, so it might get some extra mileage out of the star-driven promotional push for the more recent film.