Diary of a Network Geek

TheInternational

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

I saw The International Friday night.

It was pretty good, but not great.
This movie has been out for a little bit now, but I’m sure it’s still in theaters because it’s a pretty decent movie and, of course, rather timely, considering it’s about a bank. Rumor has it that it was, in fact, based partly on a real story, but I can’t confirm that.
In any case, the basic premise is this; a former Scotland Yard detective who’s moved over to Interpol has been after a giant, huge corrupt, shadowy bank, the International Bank of Credit and Commerce, for many years and finally gets close, but at what cost? The movie stars Clive Owen as the Scotland Yard/Interpol investigator who’s become obsessed with the bank. The movie also stars a totally unconvincing Naomi Watts as a New York Assistant DA who’s going after the bank to try and shut down one way the Mob launders their money.

The movie opens with Owen’s character waiting for a fellow investigator to come back after making contact with one of the bank’s high-ranking officers who’s about to turn on his employers. Before this investigator can cross the street, he’s killed by a very slick professional hitman in the employ of the bank. Before the night is through, the bank official is dead as well. But, the former Scotland Yard man is obsessed and now he’s close enough to smell blood, so he pursues every lead, every possible opportunity to get at the bank, even when it leads him almost to his own destruction.

Again, this movie wasn’t bad, but, frankly, for an action flick it was very slow. It really never took off and barely kept going at all in several places. Oh, there were several assassinations, and chases, one across the rooftops in Turkey, but, outside of an incredible scene in the rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York, there wasn’t anything that really caught fire.
Now, that scene in the Guggenheim was something else. It was ultra realistic, which was actually a bit of a plotting misstep, to be honest. They catch up to the assassin, who they are sure is going to let them crack the bank, but the bank has sent a team of really sloppy hitmen that spray the museum with bullets. It was incredible! And, the exact opposite of everything the bank had been doing up until that point in the movie. A total betrayal of their previous sneaky, hidden moves and completely out of character. There was one point, however, when someone tumbles off the railing and bounces down several flights of the circular balconies, finally braking his back on the lowest rail, that is so realistic it made me and the guys I went to see the movie with all wince. Trust me on this, that is one realistic scene!

All in all, it was okay. Not too many surprises, honestly, and slow for an action movie, but not bad. If you need to see this one, though, try for a matinee and avoid paying full-price. It’s not quite worth that.

I finished The Napoleon of Crime : The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief this week.
This is some of the most interesting non-fiction I’ve read in recent memory. Adam Worth was, indeed, a true master criminal. The book traced his larcenous career from its early start as a serial enlister during the Civil War, wherein Worth “died” and reenlisted several times for the signing bonus through the years as a pickpocket in New York city and on into his larger scale crimes, both in the US and abroad. Interestingly enough, he never used a gun in the commission of a crime. Apparently, Worth found it somewhat declasse and “the last resort of the small-minded”. At his peak, he ran a ring of crooks of all kinds, but maintained such a discrete distance from the actual crime that Scotland Yard could never definitively link him to a crime. They knew he had planned them, but they could never pin one on him.
His “greatest” crime was the one that almost undid him, namely the theft of Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire. At the time, this was the most expensive painting ever sold and Worth stole it to use as leverage to get a compatriot out of jail. “Little Adam”, as Worth was known, was famously loyal to the theives he organized and went to great lengths to keep, or get, them out of jail. That “honor among theives”, which was so rarely seen in reality, was one of Adam Worth’s hallmarks. And another fatal flaw. He almost bankrupt himself at least twice getting crooks out of jail, and his efforts were rarely rewarded with anything more than additional betrayal.
Still, for all his flaws, Worth was an actual master criminal who planned fabulously. He always had theives ready to work for him because his reputation was so good. For most of his working life, if you can call it that, his “jobs” went so smoothly that no one was nabbed, with few exceptions. And, those exceptions were due mainly to the utter stupidity of the crooks in Worth’s employ, including his own brother.
This book tells the story so well, that I almost forgot I was reading actual history. The writing flowed like the finest fiction and, indeed, some of the events were so incredible that one could scarcely believe them. The author, Ben Macintyre, doesn’t focus on dates and highlights the physical locations just enough to get the story across. Instead, he concentrates on what matters in Adam Worth’s life: people. The amazing characters, on both sides of the law, are what drove both this book and Worth’s life in crime. Macintyre brings them to life brilliantly. Frankly, after reading this book, I long for an age when criminals could have been so genteel and not the modern, crude thugs they have become.

I heartily reccomend this book to anyone interested in history or “true crime” or even biographies. Well worth finding and reading, even if you only have a passing interest in these topics.