The International

(Tom Twyker):

Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F O'Byrne.

Running time: 118 minutes. (15A)

Rating: 3/5

Tom Twyker's debt-ridden thriller offers the noble suggestion that bankers should be shot. I'm sure many will go along with this. The film's hero, Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), is an Interpol officer who, along with New York district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), is on the trail of a faceless rogue bank. It trades in arms deals and assassinations.

Every route the pair takes leads to corrupt indifference from on high. Owen is a very watchable gumshoe. He looks like he hasn't slept in weeks and is powered by silent fury.

Naomi Watts keeps her talent at low voltage. Twyker keeps the nuts and bolts screwed tight and sets the picture in the cold world of chrome and glass. At times, it's a nervy watch: it flips from a procedural into paranoid retreat with Euro-nasties played by Armin Mueller-Stahl and Ulrich Thomsen. There is a shoot-out in the Guggenheim that would fit nicely in Heat, while the film is inspired but doesn't improve on the paranoid thrillers of the early 1970s. It's an old format for a new fit: while films such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor were imbued with Nixonian cynicism, The International plugs straight into the crippling banking crisis.