The Hindu : Karnataka News : An ideal escape pod from gloomy days

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Sunday, Apr 26, 2009
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Karnataka

Karnataka

An ideal escape pod from gloomy days

Naomi Watts (left) and Clive Owen in ‘The International’.

The International (English)

Cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl

Director: Tom Tykwer

In these recessionary times, who would not like to watch a movie where bankers are the evil villains who control the world through debt? The International dynamically directed by the enormously-talented Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume) does precisely that and the film is thus the perfect escape pod from these gloomy doomy times.

The breathless plot that whizzes across the globe, giving us exquisite, picture postcard frames (Turkey, Milan, Germany, New York) is mainlined by the deliciously saturnine Clive Owen as troubled Interpol agent Louis Salinger.

The movie opens with a bang and the pace is kept up with suitably weighty dialogue (sample this — sometimes a man can meet his destiny on the road he took to avoid it) elegantly mixed with some utterly breathtaking action set pieces — the shootout at the Guggenheim Museum is explosive. The movie finds Salinger and Assistant D.A. from New York, Eleanor Whitman, on the heels of a bank, I.B.B.C. that seems to have its fingers in every sort of unsavoury pie.

With their investigations stonewalled at every turn and contacts monotonously turning up very dead, the duo are rapidly running out of options.

The palette, the framing, and plot points are reminiscent of the Bourne films.

There is even that feeling of going back in time before James Bond and his cars, gadgets and girls changed the template of a thriller forever.

Here a footprint provides a vital clue which seems so quaint in these days of high-tech surveillance equipment.

Where Matt Damon used his blank baby face to great effect as the amnesiac assassin, Owen is equally formidable. using his thunderous brow to articulate the burden of carrying the world’s troubles. Naomi Watts looks fragile and tough as Eleanor w

The International is the ticket for all who love a good thriller, trip on exotic locations and for every conspiracy theorist worth his/her salt.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER

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