"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," says Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare's Henry VI (Part 2). A modern dress production may change this to "let's kill all the bankers", which is the topical sentiment behind the slick, fast-moving conspiracy thriller The International. The film flits around Europe and across the Atlantic as cool New York assistant district attorney Naomi Watts and neurotic Interpol agent Clive Owen set about exposing a Luxembourg-based bank involved in selling Chinese arms both to terrorists and Israel. The bank is in league with armament manufacturers, governments, the police, intelligence agencies; everyone is being bugged, and you're as likely to be killed by an unseen assassin in a Milan piazza as to be stuck in the back by a lethal pellet outside a Berlin railway station.
A key figure in the conspiratorial forces is an elderly German, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl), formerly a dedicated communist and senior Stasi official, who wears light tweed suits and acts as international contact man for the bankers. He likes to combine business with pleasure by meeting assassins in art galleries, which leads to Owen and some New York cops tracking a killer to the Guggenheim where one of the most spectacular gunfights ever staged takes place up and down its famous ramps.
By the end, Frank Lloyd Wright's grand building has more holes in it than a ton of Swiss cheese, its glass dome has collapsed and its employees are suffering from post-traumatic stress and ready for six months of grief counselling.
Architecture is central to the meaning of The International. The villains inhabit impersonal buildings, built of glass and steel, which reflects Owen's discovery that anonymous forces operated by readily replaceable people run this world and there's nothing an ordinary citizen can do about it. So for the climax the background shifts from the canyons of New York City and the gleaming office blocks of western Europe to Istanbul, with its ancient monuments and memories, when violent acts were once rooted in faith and conviction. After a clandestine meeting beside the Blue Mosque, the chief banker is pursued through the spice market to confront his fate on a roofscape of weather-worn terracotta.
