'The International'
(Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, et al / R / Action/Adventure)
Overview: Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) joins forces with New York prosecutor Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) to put an end to a powerful bank's funding of terrorism. As they follow the money from Germany to Italy to New York to Turkey, Salinger and Whitman find their own lives are at risk from those who will stop at nothing to protect their interests.
Review: Movies like this are sort of the He’s Just Not That Into You of crime-conspiracy thrillers. They set up characters and scenarios who get ahead by sociopathically playing by their own rules. Then into the mire gets tossed an idealistic good guy who wants to effect an exception to that bad-men-win paradigm.
And after telling you over and over that he’s doomed, he winds up pulling it out and moral order is more or less restored for at least a while. Now, if this was a movie made in the '70s, the good guy would wind up face down in gutter or at least morally destroyed by the end, knowing he had to get too dirty to get the job done. Those were the days.
Mnd you, it does feature an insanely well-choreographed shootout in the Guggenheim - which easily makes it the most exciting action sequence of the year so far!