Clive Owen stars as Interpol agent Louis Salinger in the globe-hopping thriller The International. (Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures)

The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in my notebook: Five stars!

Owen’s mottled beauty and storming fury has become a staple of dark contemporary films, be they depresso-thrillers (Children of Men, Sin City) or psycho-dramas (Closer, Inside Man). Let’s just say that no one called Clive Owen for the Harry Connick Jr. part in New in Town.

Focused on the dirty dealings of the banking industry, The International is the kind of anxious, paranoid conspiracy thriller that hearkens back to The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor.

Thus, Owen’s tortured features in that opening shot flagged The International as cynical, political, contemporary, tortured – Owen-y, if you will. And it is all of those things, but a little goofy, too, tripped up by the synthetic conventions of the overworked espionage movie. Owen plays Louis Salinger, an Interpol agent trying to bring down the corrupt Luxembourg bank IBBC (International Bank of Business and Credit), which also trades in political assassination, arms deals and propping up Third World dictatorships. Any time a secret agent gets too close, he’s murdered, often alongside his family. And you thought a banking problem meant high ATM fees.

Interpol just doesn’t get it, so Salinger goes rogue, a brunette Jason Bourne with his memory intact. His inexplicable sidekick is a New York City district attorney, a nothing part that happens to be occupied by Naomi Watts. Guns cocked, they — but mostly he — jet from one fabulous European city to the next as Salinger grows more enraged at the existence of this big, monolithic organization that gets to just chug along, unfettered and evil. While Owen fumes well, it seems unlikely that Salinger wouldn’t have encountered some epic corruption in his previous job at Scotland Yard, or at Interpol. Maybe he’s just really sensitive?

As expected, there are clandestine meetings in cars, and good guys get poisoned by bad guys and die vomiting by the side of the road. Rich, creepy male executives in suits walk the halls of architecturally wondrous steel and glass structures – lairs, essentially, passing as bank headquarters. Their heels echo in the empty eee-vil corridors. None of this is done badly, but it’s so familiar as to feel watery. Take out “big bank” and plug in “pharmaceutical company” (The Constant Gardener) or “eco-entrepreneur” (Quantum of Solace), and the film loses shape, becomes generic — a type of movie but not really a movie itself.

District attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts, left) teams with Salinger to take down a corrupt international bank. (Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures)

The moments in which something unique cracks the surface are not in the script, by Eric Singer, but the work of director Tom Tykwer, who made the stylish Run, Lola, Run a decade ago. Tykwer has a black comic streak and a penchant for the high-impact visual. When Salinger is running through the back streets of Milan, chasing an assassin in a car, he turns a corner to find row upon row of near-identical vehicles waiting at a stoplight. Tykwer shoots from above, looking down at the cars calmly purring, placed there like Chiclets, preparing to gas up and mow down our hero.

Tykwer tries to take the heightened reality of the plot and put it somewhere realistic. He never makes his hero infallible: Salinger runs across a busy freeway and — doink — he’s downed by a van and taken to the hospital. The ringing in his ears recurs throughout the film, a humming reminder of what he needs to do.

These small, redeeming details hint at the film’s set piece, a 14-minute chase scene in New York’s Guggenheim Museum (actually a reproduction, thankfully) so electric that The International can be forgiven its mediocrity. While video installations dangle from the ceilings and gallery-goers slowly move from piece to piece, Salinger and two NYPD cops move in for a sting. The ambush is sudden and lunatic, so off-putting as to make you laugh. Machine guns are pulled, killers emerge from every curved corner and the white of the rotunda means a clear view of each bullet’s outline. It’s a blood bath drawn very creatively, tense and even sometimes funny (one civilian has the misfortune of having his cellphone go off in the middle of the action). But there are still regular people, lovers of video art, in this space, screaming in terror. I appreciated Tykwer’s merciless choice to leave them screaming. We aren’t permitted the fantasy that all of this can happen without collateral damage.

The International has good timing, even while it feels like it arrived in a capsule from the 1970s. It’s the kind of anxious, paranoid conspiracy thriller that hearkens back to The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, and why not? We’re all feeling as disillusioned now as the post-Woodstock generation did back then, and the banks — predatory and unregulated, like all bad guys — are the most vilified players of this recession. The IBBC doesn’t want money, as one character says, but debt — that is, they want us to be in debt to them. The only upside to this non-revelation is that as long as greed and cynicism are at work, Clive Owen will always make movies.

The International opens Feb. 13.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.