Saturday, July 18, 2009

The International

Clive Owen looks a lot more like Tracey Emin's bed in Tom Tykwer's grey-market finance caper. It's fast moving, stylish and ultimately shallow, all in a sub-Bournish kind of way. (And perhaps a bit sub-Bondish at times too.)

All very entertaining for sure, but questions linger...

Token yank or token female? What exactly is Naomi Watts's role in all this?

Why do all the IBBC's bankster board members dress like advertising or PR execs?

Wouldn't it have been easier just to do the deal with the Turk in the first place rather than going to the trouble of assassinating a senior Italian politician?

Really, in this day and age who was going to believe that the Red Brigade had bumped off Calvini?

How did so many gun-toting goons get inside the Guggenheim?

Why did 'the consultant' take off his bullet-proof vest?

And whichever way you look at it, the two snipers/pre-prepared extra bullet-casing ruse makes no sense at all. What if the first sniper hadn't missed...or if they both had?

NB: The literally cut-throat banking practices of the IBBC in this movie, are of course based on the factual activities of the truly toxic BCCI - responsible, amongst other things, for the murder of Financial Times journalist Anson Ng, who had chasing a big story about the bank down here and was found dead in an apartment in Guatemala City.

See The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI by Jonathan Beaty.

Grade: B+(+)

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