Reviews of The International, Friday the 13th and Two Lovers.
The International
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Starring Clive Owen, Namoi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O’Byrne
**
The International is positioning itself as a globe-trotting thriller for moviegoers who gave up on the James Bond franchise or get motion sickness just thinking about those shaky Jason Bourne adventures. Clive Owen, once a leading contender to take over 007′s license to kill before Daniel Craig got the part, plays an intense Interpol agent who doggedly pursues the villainous higher-ups at a major European bank across countries and continents as they plot a major weapons deal. Frequently accompanying him is an overzealous Manhattan D.A. (Naomi Watts), who also longs to see the bank brought to justice for its conspiratorial ways. Their journey includes pit stops in Berlin, Milan, Turkey and New York, where Owen engages in a lengthy shoot-out in the famed Guggenheim Museum.
If only the actual movie were as exciting as this thumbnail plot synopsis suggests. But The International is a painfully flat affair, springing to life only in the aforementioned Guggenheim sequence and the closing 15 minutes when Owen finally confronts the bad bankers face-to-face. There are a number of reasons why this thriller fails to thrill, beginning with Eric Warren Singer’s script, which is filled with pronounced gaps in logic and banal dialogue. Poor Watts has to shoulder much of the burden of the screenplay’s deficiencies. There’s no earthly reason, for example, why a D.A. would be able to jet off regularly to Europe to join an Interpol agent on his stakeouts. As if to answer our skepticism, the actress spits out the line “Who gives a shit about jurisdictional providence?!,” which is actually one of the better bits of bad dialogue she’s forced to deliver. Then there’s the issue of the film’s central mystery or, to be more accurate, the lack of any central mystery. The bank’s agenda is clear cut from the beginning, which means Owen’s investigation doesn’t yield any surprises or unexpected plot developments. Instead, the movie quickly falls into a repetitive series of scenes featuring a grim-faced Owen sitting down with other grim-faced men as they grimly talk about grim things. No wonder the Guggenheim sequence is the high point of the movie—it’s the only scene where the actors get any exercise.
The International marks German director Tom Tykwer’s belated introduction to Hollywood, almost a decade after her burst onto the world cinema scene with Run, Lola, Run. Unfortunately, he seems to have left his sense of style back home in Europe. To be fair, this breed of film doesn’t really cry out for the kinds of visual pyrotechnics that distinguished Lola. As Spike Lee proved with Inside Man though, it’s possible for a filmmaker with a recognizable style to take a standard genre piece and put his or her own stamp on it. But the direction in The International is as bland as the film’s title. I do give Tykwer and Singer credit for ending the film on such a cynical note. It’s clear that their goal is to make a thriller that actually has something to say about the world we live in now, as opposed to a movie like Taken that basically takes place in a fantasy land. What they neglected to realize though is that Taken is a heck of a lot more fun to watch.
Verdict: Skip It
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Also in Theaters
Friday the 13th
Directed by Marcus Nispel
Starring Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti, Derek Mears
**1/2
Did Friday the 13th really need to be remade? Probably not, but this 21st century update isn’t the disaster you might expect. It helps that most of the previous Friday the 13th installments were pretty awful, so director Marcus Nispel didn’t have to work that hard to improve on films like, say, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning or Friday the 13th Part 9: Jason Goes to Hell. At the end of the day, this new Friday the 13th doesn’t deviate from the formula that made the franchise a hit: a little T&A, a little pot and a whole lot of bloodshed. The only real difference is budget; where the early Friday the 13th flicks were produced for spare change, Nispel was given almost $20 million to play with. And while that’s not Benjamin Button money, $20 million does buy you an awful lot of fake blood and gruesome prosthetics. Do I really need to bother saying that the story is lame and the acting generally bad? It’s not like folks are going into this movie looking for great drama; what they want are bloody kills and Nispel obliges them. One kid gets his leg caught in a bear trap, another is burnt alive in a sleeping bag and still another is skewered through the head with a machete. None of this stuff is actually scary, by the way, but that’s always been the case with this franchise, which thrives on shock rather than suspense. The best compliment I can pay Nispel’s Friday the 13th is that it provides exactly what you expect from a Friday the 13th picture. And for the movie’s target audience, that’s enough of a recommendation.
Verdict: Rent It
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Two Lovers
Directed by James Gray
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw
***
Joaquin Phoenix has been claiming for awhile now that Two Lovers is going to be his last film as an actor, before he embarks on a new career as a musician. Whether he’s telling the truth or if this is all just an elaborate hoax (as some have claimed), there are worse way to retire from the acting game—just ask Sean Connery, who ended his career with the hideously bad would-be blockbuster The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In contrast, Phoenix is going out the same way he came in: by giving a solid performance in a good, if not exactly groundbreaking, indie drama. (In the interest of complete accuracy, Phoenix regularly appeared in movies and television as a kid, but 1996′s Inventing the Abbots marked his coming-out as a grown-up actor.) Two Lovers casts him as Leonard, an emotionally troubled Brighton Beach boy who attempts suicide after breaking up with his longtime fiancée. Reeling from the split, he finds himself attracted to two new women, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the pretty daughter of his father’s business partner, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a glamorous blonde who is having an affair with a high-powered Manhattan lawyer. While Sandra is obviously the better choice for him, Leonard can’t get Michelle out of his mind and pursues her relentlessly, even though heartbreak is almost certainly inevitable. A New York native, Gray has a terrific eye for Brighton’s desolate beauty and he clearly has a great rapport with his cast. Paltrow delivers one of her best performances to date as the wild child Michelle, while Shaw, a former model cast against type as a dowdy working-class girl, establishes some serious dramatic cred here. For all the actors’ efforts though, Two Lovers is never as emotionally compelling as it should be. Maybe that’s because the resolution is obvious from the get-go and that sense of inevitability keeps viewers at arm’s length as the story unfolds. Still, the strong performances and the gritty Brooklyn setting make this an above-average romantic drama.
Verdict: See It
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The Caller
Directed by Richard Ledes
Starring Frank Langella, Elliot Gould, Laura Harring
**
I’d like to tell you what the indie thriller The Caller, starring current Oscar nominee Frank Langella and one-time superstar Elliot Gould, was about, but honestly this low-key film is so low-key, it almost put me to sleep. Langella plays some kind of executive turned whistle blower, whose efforts to expose a corporation’s dark secrets make him a marked man. So he secretly enlists the services of a private eye (Gould) to spy on him, although he doesn’t inform the P.I. that his employer and his subject are the same man. It eventually emerges that Langella has a very specific reason for hiring Gould, one that dates back to childhood. By the time their connection is revealed though, many viewers will probably have tuned out. Much like The International, The Caller aspires to be a thinking person’s thriller, but forgets to include any actual thrills.
Verdict: Skip It
