No one could say that German director Tom Tykwer’s new thriller, which opened the Berlin Festival last night, isn’t bang up to date. Its villains are leading bankers.

This lot, however, are not just greedy and incompetent but downright corrupt as well, prone to a spot of assassination when anyone gets in their way. They specialise in selling arms to illegal regimes, and when a fellow agent is murdered, Clive Owen’s Euro cop enlists the aid of Naomi Watts’s New York district attorney to race through Europe and New York on the trail of the besuited money men. It’s a dangerous business and the two have no time for either romance or humour as they avoid Armin Mueller-Stahl’s murky fix-it man and the goons he has hired.

Tykwer is the film-maker who proved the German cinema could do this sort of thing with the hugely successful Run, Lola, Run, in which Franka Potente, having somehow got hold of $100,000 for her boyfriend, is given 20 minutes to race through the city to reach him before gangsters finish him off for not paying.

Owen and Watts get considerably more time than that as they run around the world after their prey, finding worse and worse villainy on the way. But there is the same sense of urgency and the same observant eye for crisp urban detail. Unfortunately, there are more words here, and they are not very convincing.

The pair frown a lot and spit out their bits of expository dialogue decently enough. But clearly action is the name of this particular game. It includes an Uzi firefight which nearly destroys the Guggenheim Gallery and several other sequences that make the film look as if it is trying to ape the Bourne series with a little less money.

Perhaps it is, but an unkempt and rather dour Owen is no real substitute for Matt Damon and Tykwer can’t match Paul Greengrass for managing to be intimate and spectacular at the same time.

So this appears a fairly hollow thriller which sometimes excites visually but seldom does anything for the mind’s eye. It’s out of competition in Berlin which is perhaps just as well for the Standard’s best actress Tilda Swinton, who is head of the jury this year. She won’t have to pronounce on it.