Globe-plodding

I've been really proud of myself as this new semester begins as I've been focused and getting a bunch of work during the day and then still being able to catch the late movie at the budget theater in order to catch up on all the movies I want to see. But you don't want to hear about that, you'd rather just read my review (if you even want to do that), so let's get to it.

Next up here is Body of Lies, a political thriller that came out last October. Starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Ridley Scott, this seemed like a sure-fire hit. But what it was, was a complete miss. The movie just rolls on looking for a voice and never finds it. They basically just cobbled together a bunch of random concepts related to the war on terror and hoped their collective effort would create some sort of message.

DiCaprio plays Roger Farris, a CIA operative on the hunt for a terrorist who has been behind a series of recent bombings. Crowe plays his boss, who doesn't share his same philosophical viewpoints on how to handle these situations. If the film would have been that straight-forward, it might have been decent. But there is so much excess baggage attached to this plot that you can't keep straight what is important and what is mere filler.

The big selling point for a lot of people I think was getting to see the showdown between Crowe and DiCaprio. Seeing them verbally spar over morality and secrecy in the war on terror could have been really perplexing, but it never reaches that status. Crowe, who's usually so good in these roles seems like he's phoning it in here, no pun intended considering he spends the majority of the film on a phone. And as for DiCaprio, he seems to fade in and out of character during his speeches. You can tell what is Roger Farris and what is DiCaprio simply spouting off his own liberal agenda. The debates between these two come off more juvenille and frivolous rather than engaging or thought-provoking.

With the dialogue here completely neutered, one would hope you could fall back on the action to get you through the movie, but that too is a failure. The whole plot about trying to capture this terrorist doesn't work because the audience is never given sufficient justification to want to see him taken down. The bombings he orchestrates have no direct impact on the main characters, nor do they take place on American soil. Now I don't mean to underscore the action, but if you're going to center a film around a villain, more needs to be done to make us want to see his comeuppance.

Perhaps one of the most nauseating things about this film is how they shoehorned a romance subplot between DiCaprio's character and a Palestinian nurse. As soon as I saw DiCaprio being treated by her, I knew they would have him fall for her. And it seemed the only reason this was included was to make the statement that people from the Middle East are human beings too and we shouldn't discriminate. And that is a fine statement to make, but it has become a complete cliche in film now. It added nothing to the film and was used merely for plot device.

Now Body of Lies was based of a novel by David Ignatius. You probably would have guessed it even if I hadn't told you it. The events in the film are very segmented to the degree that you could probably tell where each chapter begun and ended in the book. Like so many film adaptations before this, I believe this was a case where the written word simply did not translate well to the big screen. I'm sure the conversations between the characters in the book were a lot more meaningful and impassioned, whereas here they were stilted.

Maybe I'm sure a bit fatigued, like so many Americans, with the war on terrors and films about it. With so many of them out there, you really need something special and unique in your film, otherwise it's just a grim reminder of what's going on in the real world. This did not possess that special trait and as a result I was bored to tears watching this.

I'm having difficulty finding a justification to give someone to watch this. I guess if you're a hardcore Crowe or DiCaprio fan or if for some reason you really love this subject matter, then you may want to see it, but I think even those people will be strongly disappointed with this film. If I were to say something positive, it would be that the film is an accurate metaphor for the war on terror. While our soldiers are fighting an ambiguous enemy, viewers of this film are watching a movie with an ambiguous plot. This movie just doesn't work and that aint no Lie. Grade: C-