The International (Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl) – Clive Owen was one of the British actors mentioned as a possible James Bond before Daniel Craig was selected. In The International, we get a sense of what he would have been like. Owen, if nothing else, comes off as a very serious actor, and he is very, very serious as Agent Louis Salinger of Interpol. Unfortunately, the script and the story are ridiculous. It tries to follow a Bond formula with a ruthless bad guy, in this case heading an evil international bank, IBBC. Lots of people die in this one, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York is destroyed in a ludicrous gunfight. Salinger teams up with an assistant Manhattan district attorney, played by Naomi Watts, who can be very good or pretty bad. Here, she is just window dressing. Owen tries hard to get the audience to understand the gravity of the threat that IBBC causes as the bank gets into arms distribution as a means to control debt internationally. I guess I’m just not smart enough to understand why controlling debt is the key to ruling the world. Anyway, the travelogue takes us to Milan, Berlin, New York, and Istanbul. Actually, the photography is the best part of the movie. I suppose making a bank the villain makes a world of sense in today’s world so audiences might like it. The moderate-sized opening day crowd I was with seemed pretty ambivalent except to squirm at all the right places when the blood started spurting out of various bodies. I would not recommend this film to people serious about movies. But if you can totally suspend disbelief and just want to see a shoot-em-up with lots of action, then you might want to spend matinee cash in The International.