Todd McCarthy of 'Variety' writes of this film: "One hopes that there is more verisimilitude to the North African scenes (shot in Morocco) than there is for the Chicago section; the block on which the Witherspoon character lives was quite clearly lensed in California, as it looks absolutely nothing like any street in Illinois." Well, how would McCarthy expect the "North African" scenes to have more verisimilitude than the Stateside ones? The Arab characters speak a mixed generic Arabic no actual people speak, and live in settings that are never specific either. If the Chicago of the movie is fake, at least a town is specified, but not for the town in "North Africa." Basically, 'Rendition' is another American film about Arabs and terrorism and US intelligence that bandies about false generalizations in scenes that aren't real. It isn't effective or entertaining even as fantasy. Reviews of this 2007 release have justifiably blamed the director, Gavin Hood, for turning 'Rendition's' melodramatic, potentially wrenching and explosive story into something that winds up being muddled and flat--which is basically true. Apparently Hood was trying to be subtle, but he had the wrong material for that.
One may also fault the writer Kelley Sane. How much does Sane really know about international politics, anti-terrorism, terrorism itself, particularly the Islamist kind--or about the US government and the Arab World? How much does any American mainstream filmmaker know about these things? One exception: Gaghan's 'Syriana.' It's impossible to follow, but at least conveys some sense of the complexities and ironies of these tangled issues and worlds. Here things are simplified to make a point--that "extraordinary rendition" is bad, cruel, unethical, and in violation of international law, Besides also being terrible for PR, it's a poor intelligence-gathering device, especially when the victim turns out to be innocent. There may have been hundreds of renditions, dozens of which, at least, involved men we now know to have been wrongly accused as, most famously, was the case with Khaled al-Masri and Maher Arar. The practice and the term "extraordinary rendition" began with the Clinton administration, as is explained in the film, but was obviously stepped up after 9/11. Plainly the plot is heavily weighted toward critiquing this dubious tactic. But even assuming such an agenda is proper to a fiction feature, the result is muddled; it gets lost in sequences that are paradoxically both simplistic and overcomplicated.
As in Ridley Scott's disappointing 'Body of Lies' and Jeffrey Nachmanoff's inaccurate 'Traitor,' 'Rendition' uses explosions as the starting point of its action. Somebody sets off a bomb that kills a CIA operative in that generic, unreal "North Africa." A younger, more innocent and less experienced CIA man called Freeman (Jake Gyllenhall), transparently conceived as the moral "heart'" of the piece, has survived the blast. He is immediately moved in to replace the dead operative and act as an increasingly skeptical (but disappointingly limp) "observer" of "extraordinary rendition" interrogation-cum-torture designed to trace the imagined mastermind of the blast. The CIA thinks it knows who was behind the bomb.
They also think an Egyptian-born scientist called Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), a US resident married to a pregnant Reese Witherspoon, has received calls on his cell phone from this man. Terrorist monikers are confusing, and Americans aren't very good at Arabic names anyway: El-Ibrahimi may not be at all involved. Nonethess he is subjected to a terrible ordeal. A Stateside CIA lady (Meryl Streep, in ice queen mode) orders El-Ibrahimi, who's just returning from a conference in Johannesburg, to be "rendered" to where the bombing took place (not really the way "rendition" usually has occurred).
To liven things up the local cop in charge of the brutal extra-legal interrogation is having family problems. He is Abasi Fawwal, played by Yigal Naor, an Israeli actor of Iraqi Jewish origins (when you want cruel, hire an Israeli). Fawwal's pretty daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) is in love with Khalid (Moa Khouas), a young man whose Islamist group he's trying to disrupt. And there are other emotional complications: the man the frantic Witherspoon seeks out to pull strings with a senator (Alan Arkin) is an old boyfriend of hers (Peter Sarsgaard). Eventually Sarsgaard puts Witherspoon directly in contact with Arkin and Streep, with whom she pleads in vain for information about the whereabouts and safety of her disappeared husband. Meanwhile El-Ibrahimi gets tortured and Freeman watches and agonizes. To quote 'Variety' again, "Locations skip around a lot and Hood's direction provides scant fluidity to knit them together." Yes, both the screenwriter and the director have bitten off more than they could chew.
Today's movies involving Arabs and terrorism in the post-9/11 world like 'Syriana,' 'Traitor,' 'Body of Lies,' and 'Rendition' make a pretense of sophistication. They have sequences shot in Arab countries, with Arabic dialogue. But the assumptions and the settings are mistaken, and the dialogue is inauthentic. At bottom the treatment is not much more sophisticated or accurate than the stereotypes described in Jack Shaheens'shocking survey, 'Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.'
'Rendition' is different from its Oriental-ist movie cousins in being a well-intentioned "message" film specifically aiming to expose an obviously brutal and extra-legal US practice. But this is a task better performed by a documentary. 'Taxi to the Dark Side' is such a film--a documentary dealing not specifically with "extraordinary rendition" but with closely related issues, in a powerful and strictly accurate way.
'Rendition's' plot hinges on the idea that Freeman, concluding that El-Ibrahimi is the wrong man and has no useful information, oversteps his authority and gets him out of the prison and back to Chicago. This plot twist overlooks the fact that "extraordinary rendition" isn't just wrong when an innocent man can provide no information, but even when a guilty one spills the beans. Little is done to clarify the issues by a film as blunt and clumsy as 'Rendition.'
One may also fault the writer Kelley Sane. How much does Sane really know about international politics, anti-terrorism, terrorism itself, particularly the Islamist kind--or about the US government and the Arab World? How much does any American mainstream filmmaker know about these things? One exception: Gaghan's 'Syriana.' It's impossible to follow, but at least conveys some sense of the complexities and ironies of these tangled issues and worlds. Here things are simplified to make a point--that "extraordinary rendition" is bad, cruel, unethical, and in violation of international law, Besides also being terrible for PR, it's a poor intelligence-gathering device, especially when the victim turns out to be innocent. There may have been hundreds of renditions, dozens of which, at least, involved men we now know to have been wrongly accused as, most famously, was the case with Khaled al-Masri and Maher Arar. The practice and the term "extraordinary rendition" began with the Clinton administration, as is explained in the film, but was obviously stepped up after 9/11. Plainly the plot is heavily weighted toward critiquing this dubious tactic. But even assuming such an agenda is proper to a fiction feature, the result is muddled; it gets lost in sequences that are paradoxically both simplistic and overcomplicated.
As in Ridley Scott's disappointing 'Body of Lies' and Jeffrey Nachmanoff's inaccurate 'Traitor,' 'Rendition' uses explosions as the starting point of its action. Somebody sets off a bomb that kills a CIA operative in that generic, unreal "North Africa." A younger, more innocent and less experienced CIA man called Freeman (Jake Gyllenhall), transparently conceived as the moral "heart'" of the piece, has survived the blast. He is immediately moved in to replace the dead operative and act as an increasingly skeptical (but disappointingly limp) "observer" of "extraordinary rendition" interrogation-cum-torture designed to trace the imagined mastermind of the blast. The CIA thinks it knows who was behind the bomb.
They also think an Egyptian-born scientist called Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), a US resident married to a pregnant Reese Witherspoon, has received calls on his cell phone from this man. Terrorist monikers are confusing, and Americans aren't very good at Arabic names anyway: El-Ibrahimi may not be at all involved. Nonethess he is subjected to a terrible ordeal. A Stateside CIA lady (Meryl Streep, in ice queen mode) orders El-Ibrahimi, who's just returning from a conference in Johannesburg, to be "rendered" to where the bombing took place (not really the way "rendition" usually has occurred).
To liven things up the local cop in charge of the brutal extra-legal interrogation is having family problems. He is Abasi Fawwal, played by Yigal Naor, an Israeli actor of Iraqi Jewish origins (when you want cruel, hire an Israeli). Fawwal's pretty daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) is in love with Khalid (Moa Khouas), a young man whose Islamist group he's trying to disrupt. And there are other emotional complications: the man the frantic Witherspoon seeks out to pull strings with a senator (Alan Arkin) is an old boyfriend of hers (Peter Sarsgaard). Eventually Sarsgaard puts Witherspoon directly in contact with Arkin and Streep, with whom she pleads in vain for information about the whereabouts and safety of her disappeared husband. Meanwhile El-Ibrahimi gets tortured and Freeman watches and agonizes. To quote 'Variety' again, "Locations skip around a lot and Hood's direction provides scant fluidity to knit them together." Yes, both the screenwriter and the director have bitten off more than they could chew.
Today's movies involving Arabs and terrorism in the post-9/11 world like 'Syriana,' 'Traitor,' 'Body of Lies,' and 'Rendition' make a pretense of sophistication. They have sequences shot in Arab countries, with Arabic dialogue. But the assumptions and the settings are mistaken, and the dialogue is inauthentic. At bottom the treatment is not much more sophisticated or accurate than the stereotypes described in Jack Shaheens'shocking survey, 'Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.'
'Rendition' is different from its Oriental-ist movie cousins in being a well-intentioned "message" film specifically aiming to expose an obviously brutal and extra-legal US practice. But this is a task better performed by a documentary. 'Taxi to the Dark Side' is such a film--a documentary dealing not specifically with "extraordinary rendition" but with closely related issues, in a powerful and strictly accurate way.
'Rendition's' plot hinges on the idea that Freeman, concluding that El-Ibrahimi is the wrong man and has no useful information, oversteps his authority and gets him out of the prison and back to Chicago. This plot twist overlooks the fact that "extraordinary rendition" isn't just wrong when an innocent man can provide no information, but even when a guilty one spills the beans. Little is done to clarify the issues by a film as blunt and clumsy as 'Rendition.'