Who’s In It: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl
The Basics: Clive Owen is a broken-down Interpol agent on the trail of an evil international bank that funds terrorists and assorted other bad guys. Naomi Watts rides shotgun but doesn’t have much to do. Meanwhile, seen-it-all Clive is shocked, SHOCKED, by the level of mercenary amorality he encounters. You probably won’t be, though, since you already live in the real world where even your sweet, gentle grandma knows that the banking industry would foreclose on your pets and lesser-used body parts if they could figure out a way to melt them down into gold bullion.
What’s The Deal: Movies like this are sort of the He’s Just Not That Into You of crime-conspiracy thrillers. They set up characters and scenarios who get ahead by sociopathically playing by their own rules. Then into the mire gets tossed an idealistic good guy who wants to effect an exception to that bad-men-win paradigm. And after telling you over and over that he’s doomed, he winds up pulling it out and moral order is more or less restored for at least a while. Now, if this was a movie made in the '70s, the good guy would wind up face down in gutter or at least morally destroyed by the end, knowing he had to get too dirty to get the job done. Those were the days.
Why You Won’t Be Too Annoyed By It Anyway: It looks amazing. German director Tom Tykwer, who made Run, Lola, Run, knows how to point his camera at the right stuff and he has a different set of stylistic ideas than most hacky American action filmmakers. So thanks to arthouse cinema being on life-support at the moment, the people who can cross over (Run, director, run!) do so and, for their willingness to play by Hollywood’s rules, provide viewers that odd, frictiony multiplex experience of seeing the same old thing dressed up in fancier clothes. And fancier clothes are always nice.
Why You Won’t Be Too Annoyed By It Anyway, Part 2: Clive Owen. I like that he always looks so exhausted, no matter what movie he’s in. Some people would pay major money to have dark eye circles like his erased with laserbeams or whatever. Not him. Acting is, at least, partly about the physical. And if you naturally appear to be handsomely battered by life, then it’s like you’ve got a secret weapon other people need prosthetic make-up tricks to replicate.
Almost Worth The Ticket Price Just For: An insanely well-choreographed shootout in the Guggenheim. It's the most exciting action sequence of the year so far (I know, I know, it's still only February, but other movies are going to have a tough time touching this one). And in case it freaks you out to see a swanky museum abused in such a manner, know that they built an exact replica in a German soundstage, one that they could riddle with bullets.