It’s not that there’s much wrong with The International.  More that there’s not much right about it either.  It’s a perfectly competent thriller of a sort that you’ll have seen many times before, with a few interesting differences.  Like, despite its American tone it’s set in Europe.  And its direction is far superior to its script, which hits some of the right notes you’d expect in a conspiracy yarn, but doesn’t really get the blood racing.

Directed by Tom Twyker, the creative force behind Run Lola Run, it’s Twyker’s choices and instincts that separate the film from so many other contenders.  Pity about Eric Singer’s screenplay, which didn’t really do much for me.  There’s lots of perfunctory stuff about a global banking conspiracy involved in assassinations, and the bad guys send their team out to hunt goodies Clive Owen and Naomi Watts.

He’s an intrepid Interpol agent, she’s a New York district attorney: together, they fight crime.  And to give them credit, they do their best with a lacklustre script that Twyker does a fine job with, considering.  There are some lovely touches: Watts gets hit by a car, and rather than bounce back straight away, she’s actually hurt by it, and you get to see the bruising later.  A world away from the Bourne style antics I suspect someone involved in commissioning this movie had in mind.

There’s a general sense that the locations are lived in, and not just there to be used for set pieces.  People act in credible ways when violence erupts in their midst.  In the seconds following an assassination, the police faff around in shock before responding: just the sort of human detail that brings the film to life intermittently.

The problem is, bluntly, who cares?  It’s not news that bankers can be an unpleasant bunch, but rather than giving the story a topical resonance it just hangs there in the background, while the protagonists chase from one country to another being followed by identikit gunmen.  Along the way there are some effective set pieces, such as when Clive Owen looks in a traffic jam for the car that contains his pursuer, only to discover that the driver has abandoned it amid the gridlock.

The corporate thriller certainly can work, as Michael Clayton proved admirably the other year.  There was a sense then though, that the writer knew and understood the world of corporate law he was writing about, and created characters that inhabited it awkwardly, credibly, humanely.  By contrast, The International comes across like an A level student who has just discovered that global economics is, like, a bad thing, and wants to edjumacate you about it, even though she’s yet to experience the world of work.

Fingers crossed, Tom Twyker will go on to make the successful mainstream thriller that he’s clearly angling for here.  He’s got talent in abundance: what he doesn’t have is an interesting script.  I can only speculate about how this project came into being: was it Twyker’s baby all along, or was he assigned to it by Paramount?  Whatever the truth, I hope he delivers the goods next time more compellingly than he did in this mediocre outing.