Ex-Scotland Yard detective Lou (Owen) is an Interpol agent fed up with leaving all the police work to the locals, so on a case involving New York DA Eleanor (Watts) he heads right into the thick of things, investigating ties between a European bank, arms dealers and the mob. Travelling from Berlin to Lyon to New York to Milan to Istanbul, he and Eleanor get deeper into a web of shifty bankers (Thomsen), shady fix-it men (Mueller-Stahl), creepy lawyers (Baladi) and quiet hitmen (O'Byrne). Not to mention corrupt cops and greedy governments.

The film has the potential to be another Michael Clayton type of thriller, focussing on its central character rather than the machinations of a movie plot. But this script doesn't make much of the characters at all, and certainly never gives Lou much of a personal journey. And most of Watts' dialog is plot exposition that's either painfully complicated or annoyingly clunky. It's not that these are uninteresting characters; The entire cast is made up of solid actors doing their best to breathe life into a dusty screenplay.

Which is what Tykwer is doing as well. He directs with a steely, glassy slickness that makes sure the film looks gorgeous. And when it does break out into action, such as a chaotic sequence in New York's Guggenheim, it's genuinely thrilling. But these scenes are few and far between in a movie made up mostly of phone calls and round-table meetings and characters who are flinging up smokescreens everywhere they go.

Underneath the glacial surface, there are some intriguing themes prowling around, although they also pop up in declaratory dialog that leaves nothing left for us to discover on our own. "Justice is an illusion," says one character, noting that literally everyone is involved in this conspiracy. He also says, "The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." And, frankly, fiction should also be a lot more fun.

themes, language, violence, grisliness

18.Feb.09