'The International': Worldly Fun

If "The International" were an article of clothing, it would be a gray cashmere sweater. If it were a place, it would be the first-class lounge of a major metropolitan airport. If it were weather, it would be a wintry mix of drizzle with the occasional flurry.

And if this sleek, stylish thriller were a person, well, it would be Clive Owen, who happens to carry "The International" on his strong and handsome shoulders with the unflappable cool that makes some of us still rue the day he wasn't cast as James Bond. (But we're not bitter!)

Owen plays Interpol agent Lou Salinger, a gruff, obsessed loner who for years has been on the trail of a corrupt bank (based on the real-life Bank of Credit and Commerce International). Now he's working with the Manhattan district attorney's office, specifically a comely assistant D.A. named Ella Whitman, played in an unobjectionable if undistinguished performance by Naomi Watts.

Salinger's quarry, a Nordic super-capitalist who resembles King Leopold's paler, more well-heeled ghost, makes an ideal villain for these economic times, and "The International" turns out to be propelled as much by prescience as by plot. "You control the debt, you control everything," a character says at one point. Don't we know it, bub.

Similar pronouncements lard Eric Warren Singer's aphoristic script, in which way too many lines of dialogue begin with "Sometimes," as in "Sometimes a man meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it" or "Sometimes you have to know which bridge you cross and which bridge you burn. I'm the one you burn." But even these florid asides don't slow down "The International," which takes an increasingly jet-lagged Salinger from Berlin and Milan to New York and Istanbul with supremely confident ease and even the odd touch of knowing humor.

Does "The International" make sense? Not always. (Surely a scene involving a package being delivered at an Italian flower stand will make sense the second or third time around.) And it doesn't deliver quite the satisfying payoff that TARP-weary audiences may be hungry for, settling for futility when full-blown catharsis would feel better. But the few points it loses for substance are more than made up for in style. Director Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") steers "The International" through its global course with sober, smooth efficiency, striking a tone of muted urgency, the restrained mood embellished by a terrific musical score he wrote with Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. With its palette of silvery grays and matte blacks, "The International" is in many ways a throwback to the lean, monochrome urban thrillers of the 1970s, with an added topical twist.

And you know what? There are worse ways to spend a February day than watching Clive Owen do anything, let alone look cool in lots of attractive locations. With his signature expression of wounded, if slightly irritated, vulnerability, he makes for an ideal leading man of both action and angst. And if Owen himself isn't enough of a draw, "The International" features the first great shootout scene of the year, in the film's eye-popping set piece choreographed within a video installation at the Guggenheim Museum. Loud, bloody, outrageous and technically dazzling, the sequence swings for the fences as an extravagant, slyly funny black valentine to philistines everywhere.

The International (116 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violence and profanity.