"If you beat your wife in the morning and then don't know why...then she does..." (Rendition (DVD))

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Rendition (DVD)
Date:	20/03/08 (608 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tense, thoughtful thriller..

Disadvantages: Not quite smart and intricate enough for me

As the worlds financial markets run blood red like the streets of Iraq, Hollywood has woken up to their responsibility to address the real and ghastly truths of Americas so called "War on Terror". How ironic is it that America now has to go cap-in-hand to those very same oil rich Arabic investment banks that are making trillions of dollars from the high oil price to bail Bush out with their equity funds after his bungled oil grab has hiked the price so much. I'm sure there's a rye smile on Bin Ladens mug.
Although 'Rendition', perhaps wrongly billed as an intelligent thriller on the minutia of Americas foreign policy on the dust-cover, doesn't get to the guts of the reasons why Bush is whipping Muslims off the streets to keep his citizens fearful, it does finally remind American film goers that the U.S will play nasty to get what they have and have been doing so since the 60s. If they knew what the CIA were doing in Central and South America in the 70s and 80s they would be horrified.

One of the most controversial and covert aspects of the 'The War on Terror' has been this thing called 'Extraordinary Rendition', American intelligence agencies whipping suspected terror suspects off the streets of American soil (and other countries) and away to a seedy third party country not under US jurisdiction that are paid well for turning a blind eye and keeping stuck. Here the so called 'illegal combatants' can then be tortured by the likes of the CIA (or even the in-house thugs) and so information brutally extracted, although its unknown how much useful information they have actually got this way, if the suspects are even involved in any terrorism. If you're in a dank Bulgarian jail on a disused airbase and someone puts a bowie knife to your balls then you're going to say anything to get out of there to keep your knackers. Torture doesn't work and that's why it's so controversial.

No one would have an issue with torturing genuine Muslim terrorists but the evidence suggests places like Guantanamo Bay are really about trying to justify the 'War On Terror' by rounding up Jihadist fighters (Islamic mercenaries who fight conventional warfare in threatened Muslim lands) and classing them as the same breed who knocked down the twin towers or blew up London. No Guantanamo Bay, no visible War on Terror... It's a far better tactic than the CIA having to organize the twin towers atrocities every three years or so to keep fearful Americans onside with their logistical oil grab policies. Not that the CIA would ever do something like that. Apparently you can even download the Anarchist Cook book (the so called 'Terrorist's Bible') from their website!

-The Plot-

We open with that now oh so familiar scene of a suicide bomber blowing up a in a market place, the Tunis chief-of police (Abasi Fawal) the target, two CIA field agents caught in the blast. One is dead, the other, analyst agent Doug Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), is blooded but ok. In this part of the world fete means instant promotion, Freeman now heading the investigation, the third guy to be promoted to this position in the last two years.

His first suspect is Anwar El Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an American Egyptian, on the way home to America from Cape Town to be with his pregnant wife (Reece Witherspoon), who is waiting with her young son at Chicago O'Hare airport for her husband. But he doesn't show in arrivals, grabbed and hooded, before being bundled onto a fueled Learjet, his bags confiscated and his name deleted from ever being on the commercial flights manifest. On the say of Senator Whitman (Meryl Streep) he is flown to Tunisia for the type of extra interrogation that may not be appreciated in an American jail but all the rage in Abu Grad not long ago. On the flimsiest of evidence he is now a terror suspect with 3000 volts running through his nipples, his jailers demanding to know his connections with a known terror cell, and his chemical engineer degree background working with explosives for the Dallas AFT (Alcohol.Firearms.Tobacco) in America doesn't look good for him, whether he's their man or not.

The third tear of the story is the forbidden romance between the police chief's young pretty daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) and Khalid (Moa Khouas), who is secretly radicalized and flirting with extremism in a shadowy mosque. Fatima is oblivious to this and thinks his furtive movements are about another woman. Khalid is torn between his girl and his God. Her dad, of course, is not best pleased with her daughter's disobedience and has ways and means of finding her lover.

The story revs up as Agent Freeman watches on as the police chief tortures Anwar, clearly a guy who knows little of his crimes. Back in Washington his wife uses an old school friend who is now a congressman (William Dixon) to find out what has happened to her husband, it quickly becoming clear to them he has been lifted from the flight, a credit card bill showing he was on it, which the authorities don't want to know about. With flat denials all around the voltage is increased, not only on Anwars frail body, but the narrative, the sweat and blood dripping off him soon to be flowing like the movies adrenaline as the first twist kicks in.


-CAST-

Omar Metwally ... Anwar El-Ibrahimi
Reese Witherspoon ... Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi
Aramis Knight ... Jeremy El-Ibrahimi
Rosie Malek-Yonan ... Nuru El-Ibrahimi
Jake Gyllenhaal ... Douglas Freeman
Moa Khouas ... Khalid
Zineb Oukach ... Fatima Fawal
Yigal Naor ... Abasi Fawal
Laila Mrabti ... Lina Fawal
David Fabrizio ... William Dixon
Mounir Margoum ... Rani
Driss Roukhe ... Bahi
J.K. Simmons ... Lee Mayer
Meryl Streep ... Corrine Whitman
Bob Gunton ... Lars Whitman

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

-Quotes-

Douglas Freeman:

In all the years you've been doing this, how often can you say that we've produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies

Simmons:

We need those f**king enemies kid. You can't have what you have in America without them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

-Conclusions-

The secret of director Gavin Woods's tense thriller is the segmentation and timeline flipping, the clever twist near the end leaving you as confused as you are impressed, as all good twists do. Gyllenhaal is again slightly miscast, a man of few words at the best of times, and keeps picking the wrong movies. Reece Witherspoon is also dwarfed by the subject matter and it's a relief to see Meryl Streep there wit her stern performance to keep the films integrity and credentials.

The real problem with this is its not sophisticated enough a script to tease the intelligent people who will rent it and her expecting that. When you're used to the West Wing and the brilliant Bourne Movies you expect a little more from a movie that claims to put itself on that level. For instance, Anwar is lifted for the most tenuous of reasons, meaning pretty much anyone who gets a wrong number could end up in a Tunisia jail being whacked with a pool ball in a sock. Maybe that was some sort of statement by the writers that this rendition thing is nonsense and has no foundations. I personally suspect the reason that plot mechanism is so weak is to make it palatable for American audiences who really don't want to know or contemplate this stuff, hence its unusually low imdb rating.

The film has an energetic pace to it and tenses up nicely towards the end, the viewer always engaged in the mystery solving on offer. Its political message is clear but unsophisticated and although it covers the main points of Americas covert 'War on Terror' its not prepared to go that extra step that was needed and show us the nasty underbelly of war and corruption in America. When war is deliberately unleashed then it will rage until the old men on both sides that start wars have been paid off handsomely and promoted. The west always needs an enemy as it has to look inside itself at its own evils with films like this if it isn't distracted by war. At least American filmmakers have started to look.

= = = = = = = = = = = =
RuN-TiMe 122 Minutes
Adults
£3.95 for one night's rental in Blockbusters
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Summary: Americas wake up call in the movies