Mike's betrayed by TRAITOR, but in a good way
'He was a victim of the war on terror, they were trying to do their best to stop the situation, their stories collide in a fireball of action-packed and politically relevant cinematic awesomeness.' It's a standard package by now isn't it? It's been adopted as the basic premise for a while bunch of films each with their own angle on the present conflicts in the Middle East and the Western 'War on Terror' that is somehow supposed to stop it. There's been Body of Lies [OWF review] and The Kingdom [OWF review] taking advantage of the new uncertainties of this kind of war and movies like Stop-Loss [OWF review] and Lions for Lambs [OWF review] using it as a device for political grandstanding. But somehow it keeps providing new source material. It's here that I'd quite like to go a bit Ray and complain about it, but actually I have to say that I find it interesting. I like thinking about the politics, and I'd be lying if I said that the frightening layers of espionage and intelligence that are involved aren't exciting. In the Cold War it was all gadgets and nuclear holocausts, with the odd double agent. But now it's triple agents, and loyalties aren't just political but religious, and in some cases utterly personal based on pragmatic moral judgements. That is exciting! Jeffrey Nachmanoff seems to have realised that, and has fused all of those elements together in Traitor, an espionage thriller that somehow manages to get most of it right. I have to confess that this caught me off guard a bit. Don Cheadle stars as Somali arms dealer Samir Horn who is captured selling explosives and becomes involved in a terrorist cell run from London. Don Cheadle may have been amazing in Hotel Rwanda but I was a little concerned as to whether this would be too much for him. Then I saw the story was credited to Steve Martin (yes, Bowfinger) and wondered whether Don Cheadle might be too good for the role. But once the awkward transition from Cheadle's few scenes in Arabic into the majority of heavily accented English was made with an admirable deftness I began to sit back and relax. The ensuing melee of subterfuge and deceit panned out well, with enough guessing games in play and enough believable characters to keep you comfortably (or maybe a little bit agitated) for the full two hours. There's not a lot in the way of showy action, but then I always thought that kind of undermined the point of covert operation anyway. The big bangs and gunfights of Body of Lies are replaced with tense sense of volatile or untrustworthy agents and hapless young terrorists-in-training who ineptitude could blow the mission, and it works well. Any periods that threaten to drag are held up nicely by Cheadle's performance which goes from strength to strength as the film progresses. So it might not be entirely original, or stuffed full of special effects, but Traitor is great example of how the serious stuff going on can be drawn into mainstream cinema without either demeaning the subject matter or boring the audience. And if it doesn't succeed in challenging you perception of the war on terror, it might challenge your view on Steve Martin. Traitor is on general release in the U.K. from today!
