Body of Lies - Review

Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: William Monahan/ David Ignatius (novel)
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio/Russell Crowe
Runtime: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Body of Lies is a fairly good action-drama. Like all of Ridley Scott's movies, there's one thing you can say about it: it isn't boring. It moves at a good pace from scene to scene, location to location, line of dialogue to gunshot.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, a CIA operative working in the Middle East. It's his job to expose the leaders of terrorist cells and send the info back to States, where his boss Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) can decide how to take them out.

Ridley Scott delights in showing how small the world is in the modern age. "Sending info" doesn't take as long as it used to. Though Ferris is sometimes in the streets of Jordan or the deserts of Syria, he is never without a friend. Up in the heavens sits a Predator drone, beaming his image back to the United States. At one point in the film, Ferris looks up to the sky, sees the Predator twinkling in the sun, and tells his CIA handlers to take a hike in case they blow his cover.

Ferris' target is the elusive Al-Saleem, a high level terrorist mastermind. Al-Saleem is responsible for a number of bombings in Europe, and vague intelligence suggests that he is planning dozens of attacks across the continent.

Finding him is tough. In one scene, Ed Hoffman tells the CIA brass how easy it is to avoid CIA detection as long as the person you're looking for decides to live in the past. It's a nice juxtaposition. While Hoffman has a cell phone permanently clipped to his ear and computer technology at his fingertips, it is virtually worthless as long as his quarry never uses the phone or sends an email. If a disciplined terrorist can pretend that cell phones and computers don't exist, how do you find them?

The old fashioned way. This is where Ferris comes in, using ruse after ruse, and lie after life, to bring Al-Saleem into the light. Ferris speaks Arabic, knows the Middle East like the back of his hand, and thinks he has the key to unlocking the secretive doors of the Arabic world: patience and cooperation. Early on in the film he befriends the head of Jordanian intelligence, Hani (played by a very good Mark Strong), a gentleman of impeccable dress and manners...unless you lie to him.

On the whole, the movie works, except for this: the love story. I don't mind love stories, but they have to feel real and this one doesn't. In a way, the love story could have been an movie unto itself. If it was left out of this picture it wouldn't have been missed.

Ferris' love interest is played by Golshifteh Farahani. She is strikingly beautiful and her chemistry with DiCaprio is good. It would have been interesting to see more scenes of them together in another picture, but since there weren't any in this one it was very hard to believe that DiCaprio fell for her. Their scenes just hang in mid-air, stapled to the movie as a plot device.

I wanted to like Farahani's part of the story except for one nagging detail: a woman in a suspense thriller is usually there as kidnap-bait. Though this cliche doesn't occur in the movie, it comes very close, and it's irritating. You will also find yourself wondering how a man like Ferris can sacrifice a number of innocent people, yet care so much about a woman he just met. Worse than that, Hoffman seems to care how his number one CIA talent feels about her, though he's spent the whole movie telling DiCaprio to sacrifice innocent lives and, in fact, says "there are no innocent people." Ask yourself if a man like Hoffman would ever entertain the idea of risking his agent over what Hoffman calls "poontang."

As in most films that don't satisfy, this story lets its characters go completely against type in the final third of the film and you end up feeling cheated by the writer's sleight-of-hand. In trouble and need an ending? No problem. Just make the characters do things they would never do. There's your ending. If the audience lets it go, then you've got a winner.

See the movie. It's good, but don't expect a masterpiece.

Photos: Yahoo Movies