Review: The International (3/5); Franklyn (2/5)

The International
(Tom Twyker):
Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F O’Byrne.
Running time: 118 minutes. (15A)

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.

Franklyn
(Gerald McMorrow):
Eva Green, Ryan Phillippe, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill.
Running time: 95 minutes. (16)

The debut film from British director Gerald McMorrow is overweeningly ambitious. It has four separate storylines, three of which are set in a burnished looking modern-day London, the other a noir-ish, ultra-religious sci-fi city straight out of Blade Runner.
The hero of that story is a violent vigilante and athiest Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe). Back in real life, there’s sensitive mope Milo (Sam Riley) who has a broken heart; suicidal artist Emilia (Eva Green) who wants to reconnect with her mother; and Peter (Bernard Hill), a religious man in search of his missing son.
McMorrow’s heart is in the right place: his material speaks about familial alienation and melancholia. And he has ideas, too, about mental illness and vigilantism (borrowed from the Watchmen comic). But he strives too hard at being enigmatic.
The strands of the story don’t have enough ballast, yet are kept separate for as long as possible in the hope of achieving a dramatic pay-off. And the finale, if you can get that far, is pretentious poppycock.