It’s a shame for Tom Tykwer that Paul Greengrass’s Bourne movies have set a standard to which most other purveyors of international thrillers can only aspire. A shame, too, that this German director, who surprised us all with the energetic and pop-savvy Run Lola Run, isn’t quite the man as he was. Perfume, his last film, was stylish and successful but not up to Lola’s mark. And nor is The International.

It’s slick enough, moving over Europe and America in quick time and shooting its big cities, with their sleek and shiny buildings, with some eloquence. It is also reasonably timely, since its villains are bankers and financiers, portrayed as unprincipled dealers in the goods of multinational weapons manufacturers.

Its heroes are played by Clive Owen, once tipped as Bond, and Naomi Watts, once captured by a very large ape, and we see them jetting around Lyon, Milan, Berlin, Istanbul and New York looking for the men behind the banking corporation that is not afraid to kill in order to maintain its share price and market position.

Owen plays Louis Salinger, a grumpy and unshaven Interpol operative, while Watts is Eleanor Whitman, a slightly dishevelled lawyer from the New York District Attorney’s office. Eleanor is married to a nice man who rather resents her being away so often. Louis is apparently single and seems permanently under stress. He stamps on an audio recorder at one point and is generally not in the best of tempers. There is no romance between the two.

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Though The International starts decently enough, its flailing action set-pieces and dialogue such as “sometimes a man can meet his destiny on the road he took to avoid it” drag it down to a very pedestrian level. 

Even the violent showdown at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum isn’t as good as it could be, merely laying waste to almost everything in sight as if it were a madcap shooting gallery.

Brian F O’Bryne plays the bank’s hit man, Ulrich Thomsen is the Scandinavian boss of the truant Luxembourg bank and the veteran Armin Mueller-Stahl, who worked for Fassbinder and others of the New German Cinema of the Seventies, is as watchable as ever as a former Stasi agent with a more profitable career.