Producer Paul's Ramblings

This Clive Owen/Naomi Watts thriller started out very well. Clive is an agent working with Interpol trying to discover why a bank is spending billions of dollars on missile systems.  At the beginning, his partner is meeting with a mysterious man in a car. The partner leaves the car, walks toward our hero, and drops dead. A heart attack.  Or was it?

From there the story spirals into a huge conspiracy involving crooked bankers, Libyan warlords, and weapons manufacturers. And it spirals, and spirals. And therein lies the big problem with the movie, it spirals out of control of its own plot.  There are too many people involved from too many angles and it eventually bogs down and turns from a well-paced, fairly suspenseful film (the first half) into an inert mess (the second half). Clive does a serviceable job as always, but Naomi is pretty bad, and plays a character that seems to be there only so Clive could have a female partner, in an attempt to attract a female audience. She’s very supportive, but she never actually DOES anything to speak of.

There’s a great shootout in the Guggenheim Museum, but that’s about it for action.  So what we’re left with is an action movie without much action and a thriller without enough thrills.  It’s a grand conspiracy that ends up not meaning a whole lot in the end.  Speaking of the ending, it’s a giant cop-out and ends up with nothing really resolved (although there were some newspaper clippings during the end credits that may have “resolved” things. I don’t know, I didn’t bother to watch them.)  It was a grand disappointment, especially since I enjoyed Tom Twyker’s other movies (Run Lola Run and Poison). But this time the excitement just wasn’t there.

4/10