Clive Owen, center, and Naomi Watts team up to save the world from a group of conspiratorial financiers in The International.

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German director Tom Tykwer wasn’t kidding when he named his new international thriller The International.

The plot hopscotches the globe — from Berlin to New York to the headquarters of a bank in Luxembourg to the coast of Italy to a political rally in Milan to Istanbul and back again — as it weaves a complex and twisty tale about a giant international bank that is dealing in a sophisticated missile guidance system and, presumably, the missiles themselves.

An Italian arms dealer is producing the weapons. The Chinese are somehow involved on the far fringes. So are rockets destined for the Middle East hotbed. A pretty New York assistant district attorney is trying to decipher the plot with the help of a disheveled looking Interpol agent. And there’s an old Communist who seems to be a key player in the bank’s ultimate capitalist moneymaking scheme, although he hasn’t quite given up on the teachings of Karl Marx.

Or something.

There are so many elements colliding in The International, so many shadowy characters who give scant hints of a personality, that it’s not easy to follow the plot or to become very involved in it. People turn up, get embroiled in fragments of mysterious conversations that seem terribly important, and then are killed off. As the body count climbs, one may wonder what it’s all about or why one should care.

In the end The International is about how powerful forces beyond our control are shaping the world we live in through arms dealings. But even the most powerful governments don’t want to stop them because they grease the wheels of international commerce. A threatened bank failure is met by an international effort to shore things up.

So The International at least seems up to the minute. If you’re looking for someone to blame about the international banking crisis you might find it here, at least if you can get through the plot’s density.

Tykwer made an international reputation for himself on the funny, thrilling, time-tipping Run Lola Run. That film was simple, direct, fun. But Eric Singer’s script for The International is styled more along the lines of a James Bond thriller … yet without the sexiness or imaginative gadgetry and with more jargon in the script than action.

Clive Owen, with piercing eyes and a two-day growth of beard, is the Interpol agent who is out to stop the weapons deal. He knows his operation is in danger when his partner vomits outside the Berlin train station and keels over dead just after interrogating an insider who is ready to spill the beans on the nefarious scheme. But soon that man disappears as well.

Owen’s Louis Salinger is soon joined on the trail by Manhattan Assistant DA Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts). They are dogged and cheerlessly determined. Owen and Watts develop screen chemistry, though their characters are single-goal oriented.

When a key person in the case is murdered, things grow ever more dire and dangerous for them, especially when the audience is let in on the fact that a top policeman is involved in the assassination and that, curiously, there are a pair of assassins who were working independently of one another, something that further complicates the plot.

At the center of The International is a breathtakingly spectacular shootout on the ramps surrounding the atrium of New York’s Guggenheim Museum that is thrillingly impossible. It results in noisy machine-gun fire, lots of bullet holes in the walls and an enormous mobile whose glass panels provide a never-ending cascade of shattered glass shards as they get shot out one by one.

And there are tense moments inside a mosque in Istanbul where the key players have gathered and Salinger tries to eavesdrop. But these exciting moments are too few and far between.

Much of The International seems designed to make the movie’s many international investors happy by shining a spotlight on each of their countries. But the results for the audience are dim.

**1/2The International

Starring: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O’Byrne.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity, drugs.

mjanuson@projo.com