Rendition - 3/5
Rendition is not a bad film - it has moments that are stunningly good, it has a great cast all doing good work and yet the whole film is rather flat. Part of the reason for this is that it can't really seem to decide what sort of film it wants to be - is it an issue-based drama, a political (or legal thriller) or a multi-thread story being weaved together a la Syriana or Babel. It ends up trying all and managing none wholly successful.
Director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) is clearly a talented guy, but the film suggests that maybe, in his first Hollywood outing, there was an over-eagerness to please. There are some fine grandstanding moments, but the pace for the first half is leaden and characterisation lacking in places. The place where the two plot strands should weave together also, given the serious nature of the subject, feels like a gimmick to create artificial tension.
The two strands of the plot loosely fall into a Western half and a North African half. In the Western half innocent father and husband is whisked away from an airport and packed of to North Africa to be tortured for information about a terrorist bombing. CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) becomes increasingly uncomfortable observing the interrogation. Meanwhile back in the States the missing man's wife (Reese Witherspoon) desperately tries to find information encountering compromising poiliticians (Alan Arkin and Peter Saarsgard) and intelligence chief (Meryl Streep). The great cast do well with what their given, and there are some great exchanges, but only Gyllenhaal (in perhaps his best performance to date) is given enough to develop a proper character, and even he is saddled with having to rip his shirt off at every opportunity (presumably because it is assumed female viewers will only watch a political film if their is some eye-candy).
Hood seems in many ways more comfortable with the African half, linked by the bombing and the character of the chief interrogator (Yigal Naor) who is also searching for his missing daughter, who as it turns out is shacked up with a guy with a secret. The characters in this half of the story are given much more room to develop, but where the two halves should mesh well, they feel disparate, so we end up with bits of two great movies, making one average one.
In one great exchange between Saarsgard and Streep the question is raised about whether we are bothered with the fate of one (possibly innocent man) or the whole policy of rendition. It is a question the film never really gets to grips with. Whilst the rhetoric suggests the latter, all the action - the fact that the guy is innocent and the struggle to prove him so, points to the former. As a political film, this is its crucial flaw. Contrast this to, say, Dead Man Walking, where the guilt of Sean Penn's character was never really the issue, but was rather used to hold a light up to the issue of the death penalty. Using an innocent man is the safe option - it might be a step too far to expect audiences to feel sympathy for a terrorist - but it limits the film's message, it never really tackles the policy of rendition, just the justice of the particular case.
This is a shame. Rendition is an abhorrence - this should be self-evident. If there was a moral justification for it, it would not need to be done in secret in foreign countries - the law in America would be changed. It is also one of the greatest signs that America has lost the war on terror and lost it not militarily, but through the abandonment of their own moral standards. The terrorists have made them change their way of life. The guilt or innocence of the victims of rendition is not the issue, the issue is regardless of guilt, they are human beings with rights that are being violated in the most extreme manners. This film should have you leaving the cinema incensed, that you leave with little more than a sense of "Hmmm..." is a sign of its toothlessness. A disappointing waste of opportunity, potential and talent.
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