Rendition

Director: Gavin Hood
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard, Yigal Naor
Running Time: 122 min.
Rating: R

** (out of ****)

Gavin Hood's Rendition is a blatant piece of liberal Hollywood garbage. Long known for their political leanings they sink to new depths here and take what should be a complicated moral issue and turn it into a cartoon, undercutting their own cause. I'm sure it's fun for all these actors, actresses and studio executives to talk about their discontent with our country during the Oscar parties but I really wish they'd leave it there, especially if the results are going to be this preposterous. But no matter which side of the political fence you happen to stand on everyone should be equally offended how this movie mistreats an issue so important and stacks the deck so shamelessly.

That our government is evil and we torture innocent citizens of our own country for no good reason is what this script wants audiences to believe after watching this picture. It's possible situations vaguely similar to these occur but there's no way the people involved behave so stupidly. It's the first movie made for the sole purpose of pissing off Bill O' Reilly, which could be the only positive to come out of this mess that inflicts just as much torture on its viewers as its protagonist. That it stars 3 Academy Award-winning actors willing to make complete fools out of themselves is worth contemplating. I'm glad, because nothing else in this supposedly relevant political thriller is.

On a flight to Chicago from South Africa, Egyptian Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) disappears while his pregnant wife Isabella (a horribly miscast Reese Witherspoon) and young son worry at home. It turns out he's being subjected to "rendition," which is the controversial U.S. policy of imprisoning terror suspects on foreign soil and torturing them until they cough up answers. Questionable cell phone calls is the reason given for Anwar's imprisonment, as ordered by senior C.I.A. official Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep). Assigned to oversee his interrogation in an unnamed prison in North Africa is rookie C.I.A analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), who's still reeling after surviving a suicide bombing that took the life of his partner. Meanwhile in the states, Isabella goes to Washington D.C. for help from an old flame (Peter Sarsgaard) who happens to be the aid to an important U.S. Senator (Alan Arkin).

As Anwar's interrogation/torture by a foreign brute (Yigal Naor) wears on, Freeman starts to have some serious doubts as to this man's guilt and whether our government has taken things too far. What a quick study he is. The film, which has bitten off more than it can chew as it is, also tries to string together a sub-plot involving that bombing and link it to the main storyline. All that does is create confusion because not enough time is spent on those periphery characters and their roles don't become clear until the final reel, at which point we don't care. The movie is a mess from beginning to end and it's obvious from the onset that the story can go in only one direction. However, the clumsy ways the script manages to take us there are endless.

For starters there's absolutely no doubt from the get-go this man is an upstanding citizen so the fact that he would be captured and tortured to the extent he is with basically no evidence at all is insane. Our government may be dumb sometimes, but that's really stretching it. A smarter film would have planted even just the tiniest seed of doubt as to his innocence, which would complicate an issue that's supposed to be inspiring thought and debate. Unlike last year's similarly themed A Mighty Heart, the movie doesn't back down in showing us scenes of torture. In fact, they show us much more than we need to see…over and over again. And we get different varieties of it as well. How "timely" is this movie? They even find a way to throw water boarding in there.

All of this goes on while Gyllenhaal's character stands there wide-eyed for nearly the entire running length of the picture as Anwar is pumped for information he's incapable of giving. "Should I do something?" he must be asking himself. Yeah, I think you should. Strangely, the movie poses this question to us as if we're supposed to feel any other way and it's a huge philosophical debate for the ages. I'm also getting sick of films set on foreign soil containing a musical score with a distracting Middle Eastern flavor to it, complete with chants and groans. Besides just being ignorant, it calls attention to itself in a negative way.

It stacks the deck even higher when it comes to portraying our government officials who in this film could double for Disney villains. Try imagining Miranda Priestly from the Devil Wears Prada being in charge of U.S. foreign policy and you have a good idea how Streep's character is portrayed. I almost expected Hood to throw in a scene of her downing shots with her husband to celebrate the latest innocent American to be tortured overseas. Would it have killed screenwriter Kelley Sane (or Streep for that matter) to invest this woman with just a twinge of humanity? And of course we're treated to the big money scene of Isabella screaming at her to release her husband. Arkin's senator isn't much better, but thankfully he's in fewer scenes.

While Streep and Arkin may be gifted actors I really could care less what they choose to with (or to) their careers, especially Arkin. But I can't say the same about Reese Witherspoon, who I hold to a higher standard. Why she would take a role like this is even more perplexing when you realize that despite being given top billing, she's hardly in the film at all. She isn't given nearly enough time to flesh out a person you care about which ironically causes the film to suffer from the opposite problem as A Mighty Heart, which gave us too much Marianne Pearl and not enough Daniel. This does let us get to know the victim a little bit better…except we'd rather not because he's bland and the actor playing him has no real presence or charisma. The only performer who escapes free of embarrassment is Gylenhaal who, while also miscast, does give it everything he has even when the script completely lets him down. Those curious to see whether he and Witherspoon have any chemistry onscreen won't be given any answers as they don't share so much as a single scene together in the film.

Rendition, as a motion picture experience, only really falls somewhere between the categories of bad and fair but I think what makes the film seem so much worse is the possibility that something similar to this COULD happen in reality. Rest assured that if it did, the issue wouldn't be nearly as one-sided and cut and dry as this screenplay makes it out to be. The idea of exploring extreme rendition is a fascinating one, but I was under the impression the debate concerns the torture of suspected terrorists for information, not American businessmen kidnapped at airports as our government gleefully celebrates.

I have no problem with any film taking a political stance but my only wish is that they treat the subject at hand with intelligence and we leave the film thinking about something. There's nothing to think about here. It instead succeeds only in combining the worst elements of Babel and Syriana. After this I'm more hesitant than ever to see what's supposed to be Hollywood's other political propaganda piece of the year, Robert Redford's Lions For Lambs, co-starring Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep (again). With Redford at the helm hopes should be a little higher, but the possibility that liberal Hollywood could come up with something more empty-headed than this is truly frightening. I'm all for fighting for a cause, but they're doing themselves no favors.