The International

It must be tricky being Clive Owen. You're not Matt Damon: you don't look hard enough, and you've got too much of the date-rapist look about you. You're not Daniel Craig: you're too unsubtly intense and dumb-looking. So you're this half-decent, chiseled, fairly forgettable bloke with the smell of a juvenile public schoolboy who hasn't bothered to shave. You're not even a square peg amidst round holes; more of a trapezoid.

So what do you do? How do you carve out a career in film with such an unpromising array of whateverness? You were suitably aggrieved in Closer, far too untroublesome in Inside Man and actually pretty good in a long-forgotten film called Croupier. Answer: you become a slick, insubstantial lead in actioners like Shoot-Em Up and this, The International.

Director Tom Tykwer knows how to do an action sequence or two. Run Lola Run, which was spectacularly over-rated, looked and sounded great and gave good frenetic. Here he's choreographing a daft run-around conspiracy-type romp that attempts to foster a bit of zeitgeisty-gravitas by being about banks funding terrorism and so on. You can guess most of the rest. Naomi Watts, probably the best actress of her generation, is under-used but even half-arsed acts Owen not only off the screen but into another postcode. Ulrich Thomsen, a personal fave, is superb as the bank figurehead.

It all moves along at a swift enough clip but it's a rum business this film-making: everything can seem calibrated and well-orchestrated but with The International, whilst it's ostensibly smart and well shot and edited, there's simply nothing there, other than a fair array of swanky steel and glass. And there's far too much overhead shooting, leaving it all feeling like the goings-on in an elaborate, blue-tinted, pointless ant-farm. On too many occasions you're at too much of a remove from the unfolding events, and the whole thing is too sterile and uninvolving. The buildings and cityscapes seem to draw Tykwer's attention far more than the actual plot, and he seems far happier with establishing shots, like an unbridled film student framing everything to precise death. With Owen running about looking poised but delivering very little, who can blame him for cutting the emotional cord and accepting that this is a great-looking nothing?