Any film following the line set by the James Bond films, or perhaps the Bourne series, must of necessity feature some global crime headed by a drug lord, an evil weapons seller or a vile dealer in international slave trade, with a dedicated staff headed by a steadfast idealist as the crime lord's nemesis.
In this case, it is the nefarious head of an international bank, with our master hero (Clive Owen) out to uncover a plot involving, among other crime activities, weapons sales within a vast network of banks around the world. Owen discovers, too late, that, like the mythical hydra, cut off one head and another, more fiercely, grows in its place.

For two hours, German director Tom Tykwer takes on a complex, challenging script by Eric Warren Singer, and with his already proven expert directorial skill almost turns a sow's ear into a silk purse.
With Naomi Watts in a lesser role as his pretty, capable, dirty-mouthed Girl Friday, Owen - with his perpetual tense-lipped, sad eyed look of determination, tracks down one clue after another through various locations: Berlin, Milan, New York, Istanbul - you name it. Tyker's captures it all in exotic, rich detail. (Oddly, perhaps intentionally, the early locales are in bright, window-dominated high rise buildings, gradually moving to windowless, dungeon-like locations in later scenes - to a slowly constricting desperation?)

Leaping in edits from long shots of the various locations to extreme close-ups examining faces, hands, tools in action, Tykwer plays the red herring game, almost concealing the weaknesses in the preposterous plot. He also takes a hand (with Johnny Klimek & Reinhold Heil) in composing and blasting us almost non-stop with thrilling, suspenseful metallic music that adds to the crush.

As the film progresses, the number of dead and the flow of blood almost tops the "Friday the 13th" series. The one necessary BIG shootout takes place, not, as usual, at the end of the film (which actually fizzles into "something to think about"), but mid-center, in NY's famed Guggenheim Museum. The place is riddled with bullets, huge piles of glass objet d'art shatter, the skylight is smashed, as Own & uzie-wielding gunmen wreak havoc for nearly 10-minutes. Overkill, but certainly fun to observe the impossible: Frank Lloyd Wright's "upside down cupcake" undergoing instant destruction.

The dialog is terse, lugubriously serious, and sometimes clever, as when one of the proponents of the bank's operations pragmatically says, "The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction makes sense." Wish it were true with this cleverly constructed piece from unimpressive script writing.