I went to see The International tonight, which looked like an interesting political thriller staring Clive Owen, so I think, "this movie HAS to be excellent." Oh how wrong I was.

The beginning was great. It started off with tons of action in the midst of the story. This guy has a heart attack, Clive Owen gets hit by a truck, you find out the heart attack was really a cover for an assassination attempt because of a HUGE conspiracy. AWESOME! "Gimme more! I want to know!" I soon realized that I would literally not know anything that was going on for the next hour and a half. The plotline was insanely complicated and was difficult to discern because it could only really be explained through dialoge. In fact, the only thing that was made obvious was that the villain of the story was a bank. Yes, that's right...a bank; debt is power and it can never be defeated. Way to throw the supposed latent content of the film into our faces, and make everything else unnecessarily complicated!

Right about the time I was about to gnaw off my fingers with boredom a completely ridiculous shoot-off erupts in the middle of the New York Guggenheim. In my mind the movie went from zero to awesome in 2 seconds. (Not to mention the chuckles that arose from me every time they said the word Guggenheim). It really was one of the most interesting action sequences that I have seen in a while, which was amazing since the rest of the film was almost as exciting as watching Dr. Phil.

One of the major flaws in this film was that there was a complete lack of emotion in the film, with the exception of Clive Owen’s constant anger. This made a possibly intelligent movie seem flat and not worth caring about. The only instant in which there was any attempt of emotional interaction was when the paid assassin, a man that Owen’s character was hunting down and had known for ten minutes, was shot and Owen yelled something along the lines of, “Don’t you die on me!” That may have been when I started to enjoy the horribleness of this movie.

Finally I start to see the light at the end of the unnecessarily long movie tunnel; the pace picks up, things start to makes sense as the story unravels and truths are exposed. But wait! Let’s drag this story out some more and take you to YET another country, because apparently we're not international enough yet, and keep you wondering, “Oh my god is this movie ever going to end! And how!? Nothing has really been solved.”

I’m not actually sure if the film ever ended. It could still be going on now, because, no joke, the story miraculously continued on even through the credits! Apparently 2 hours was just not enough time to explain that banks are evil and money is corrupt. Bad banks! Bad! No cookie for you!

Despite the fact that I have used 500+ words to bash this movie into the ground I’m glad I paid nine dollars to see it. I haven’t been this angry at a movie since Hellboy 2, and it's nice to let out all of my anger about the film industry every once-in-a-while.

And now this review/rant is officially as long and drawn out as The International.

Goodnight!