Around this time last year, Hollywood became very interested in terrorism as a movie subject, and it made a whole slew of films about the war on terror, none of them very good but few of them egregiously bad.
"Traitor" could belong to that same group of films. It's a run-of-the-mill genre picture that uses the war on terror as a backdrop. It imagines a quite possible scenario -- a group of Muslim extremists infiltrate the U.S. and plan to coordinate fifty suicide missions so that fifty buses around the country will explode at the same moment. The man in charge of the mission (Don Cheadle) is actually working for the C.I.A, but the F.B.I. doesn't know that, so they're after him. Meanwhile, he's trying to keep his true identity as an informant from his fellow terrorists while at the same time suffering from increasingly frequent attacks of conscience -- in order to infiltrate the network, he must continue to carry out real attacks that result in the deaths of real people.
Don Cheadle is a tremendous actor, and he pulls off this material capably, but it's not worthy of him. The film is full of obvious moral observations, such as the thesis that the United States and the Muslim extremists aren't that different from one another, as both are willing to kill innocent people in their respective efforts to fight one another, and both claim that God is on their side of the battle. These are given lowest common denominator treatment, so that while the film is moderately exciting, it's not very intelligent. It's the kind of movie that fades from memory immediately after viewing.
Also starring Guy Pearce, perhaps the most versatile actor in the world, here playing a Southern Baptist F.B.I. agent; and Jeff Daniels, hopelessly underused as Cheadle's C.I.A. contact.
Grade: B-
"Traitor" could belong to that same group of films. It's a run-of-the-mill genre picture that uses the war on terror as a backdrop. It imagines a quite possible scenario -- a group of Muslim extremists infiltrate the U.S. and plan to coordinate fifty suicide missions so that fifty buses around the country will explode at the same moment. The man in charge of the mission (Don Cheadle) is actually working for the C.I.A, but the F.B.I. doesn't know that, so they're after him. Meanwhile, he's trying to keep his true identity as an informant from his fellow terrorists while at the same time suffering from increasingly frequent attacks of conscience -- in order to infiltrate the network, he must continue to carry out real attacks that result in the deaths of real people.
Don Cheadle is a tremendous actor, and he pulls off this material capably, but it's not worthy of him. The film is full of obvious moral observations, such as the thesis that the United States and the Muslim extremists aren't that different from one another, as both are willing to kill innocent people in their respective efforts to fight one another, and both claim that God is on their side of the battle. These are given lowest common denominator treatment, so that while the film is moderately exciting, it's not very intelligent. It's the kind of movie that fades from memory immediately after viewing.
Also starring Guy Pearce, perhaps the most versatile actor in the world, here playing a Southern Baptist F.B.I. agent; and Jeff Daniels, hopelessly underused as Cheadle's C.I.A. contact.
Grade: B-