The International (opens Feb. 13)

Stars Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl.

Directed by Tom Tykwer.

Rated R; 118 minutes.

The time is just right for a thriller centered on a global bank caught in the act of extreme power mongering, with sidelines in arms dealing, extortion, political machinations and murder.

Because, after all, isn’t it at least somewhat comforting to imagine that the economic meltdown is due to evil conspiracies by extraordinarily wealthy businessmen crossing and crisscrossing international datelines, rather than just, you know, standard-issue greed and poor decision making and clueless money management?

Unfortunately, timing isn’t everything, even for Tom Tykwer, the German director whose breakthrough film, Run, Lola, Run, released in the U.S. a decade ago, demonstrated a real knack for adrenaline-rush cinema (if little feel for character development).

The International boasts plenty of exhilarating forward motion, including foot chases and a spectacular shootout and blow-it-up romp through New York’s Guggenheim Museum — or, rather, a superb mock-up of the spiraling Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building. The American-German coproduction looks fantastic, with a fit if grizzled Owen and icy blonde Naomi Watts pursuing men in expensive blue suits, shuttling from stunning steel-and-glass office buildings to exotic locales.

Missing in action, though, is the human element: Viewers may discover that they’re just not into the protagonists, created by rookie screenwriter Eric Singer, whose script is informed by the real-life criminal misdeeds of the Pakistan-based Bank of Commerce and Credit International, shuttered in 1991.

Events zip by from start to finish in the big-budget film, which, at just under two hours, feels like about 90 minutes, thanks to Tykwer’s gift for cinematic momentum. At the story’s start, in Berlin, two men meet in a car and try to hammer out a deal. One of them exits the vehicle, motions to his across-the-way partner, Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Owen), and in short order vomits, doubles over and dies.

Salinger reconnects with his American counterpart, New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Watts), and the two subsequently do battle with a steadily thickening plot and a bewildering array of accents — Italian, French, German, American, British, Libyan and probably a few others.

The International, pumped with the rhythms — rolling percussion, a single piano key struck repeatedly — of an effective score to which Tykwer contributed, roams around the world, true to its title.

Salinger and Whitman (was Singer intending literary allusions?), separately or together, carry on their investigation into the I.B.B.C. at the bank’s headquarters in Luxembourg; a political rally at a plaza in Milan; the streets of mid-town Manhattan; and, in the finale, a Byzantine cistern, bustling bazaar and orange-tinted Mediterranean rooftops in Istanbul.

Along the way, Salinger hints that he’s plagued by demons from his past; this plot strand, like some others, isn’t fleshed out.

The cinematography, by Tykwer regular Frank Griebe, is quite stunning, more frequently than not. Among the particularly dazzling sequences are that massive and very long shoot-out at the Guggenheim, where baddies and their pursuers make their way around video installations; an overhead shot, framing people streaming, antlike, away from the scene of a tragedy; and the passage in Istanbul.

The film, too, offers at least two intriguing villains, in Brian F. O’Byrne (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) as a coolly efficient assassin with a leg brace, and screen veteran Armin Mueller-Stahl (Eastern Promises, Shine, Avalon) as a former hard-line communist, now profiting from his role as a deadly “adviser” to the bank. The latter, prone to philosophical rationalizations of his work, explains to Salinger that “at last, everything comes between you and the man you wanted to be.” Far less interesting is the bland bank CEO played by Ulrich Thomsen (Hitman).

Tykwer, in his use of suspense sequences played out on grand sets, seems to want to reference Alfred Hitchcock, and even Hitchcock acolyte Brian De Palma. And the man-against-the-system storyline hints at themes coloring the films of Sidney Lumet.

Ultimately, though, The International comes off as empty motion, albeit empty motion that’s smartly photographed and expertly paced, blazing style without the substance of superior films in the same genre, like the last two, Paul Greengrass-directed installments of the Bourne series, or Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. Tykwer’s movie doesn’t even come close.