Ridley Scott's phony-baloney political thriller takes itself far too seriously, writes Donald Clarke
THE VARIABLE quality of Ridley Scott's recent output has been something to behold. For every Gladiator or American Gangsterthere is, alas, a GI Janeor an A Good Year.
Still, you do, at least, know where you stand with Sir Ridley. Getting into the swing of things quickly, he tends to open such embarrassments with a scene of such malignant vapidity that we are left in no doubt we are on a journey towards the rubbish chute.
Take Body of Lies. We begin with a terrorist bombing in a version of "Manchester, England" (sic) that seems to be partly modelled on the hilly locale in Scott's famous 1973 Hovis commercial.
A milkman whistles Rule Britannia before depositing his bottles before houses lit by the warm glow of (you might fancy) Pictish bonfires. Then there is a boom.
How long has it been since the great man revisited his northern roots? They haven't seen milk bottles up there since The Thompson Twins were in the charts.
Anyway, following this puzzling prologue, the film resolves itself into a hectic, politically insecure drama of middle-eastern espionage. The plot is deliberately tangled, but it goes something like this:
Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio), a CIA agent with a gruff voice and several false beards, has been assigned the task of flushing out a particularly ruthless Jihadist leader. While he zooms around in jeeps and bellows down mobile phones, his fat, boozy boss (yes, it's Russell Crowe) remains in Washington to follow the action via satellite relays.
The plan they devise requires Ferris to create an imaginary terrorist group and persuade their target to telephone its supposed leader. Along the way, Roger encounters a suave representative of Jordanian intelligence (Mark Strong) and begins a relationship with an Iranian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani).
Body of Lies, which is based on a novel by David Ignatius, does have its moments. The technological intricacies of the plot make the head spin - even if there is a little too much peering at laptops - and the helicopter shots career and swoop as such things should. But the film's efforts at political analysis are banal to the point of absurdity.
Towards the close, Islamicist "baddies" torture one of the supposed "goodies". While the captive twists and howls, we revisit an earlier sequence in which suspected terrorists were similarly abused by allies of the Americans. Do you get it? It's a vicious circle, you see.
All this simplistic editorialising fails to distract from the film's simultaneous attempts to romanticise and demonise the foreign. Listen as Strong's character, oiled into a crisp suit, repeatedly refers to Ferris as "dear". Wasn't that word used by Dickens's Fagin when talking to his misused posse of thieves?
Compare this with Crowe's swaggering (one-note, at the most) performance as Ferris's boss. He may be a loud-mouthed boor, but - to paraphrase a line from Oliver Stone's W. - he's the sort of loud-mouthed boor you'd like to share a beer with.
In short, Body of Liesis too dumb to be taken seriously and too self-important to work as pure lowbrow hokum.
Maybe Ridley should have passed the project on to his brother. Nobody ever accused Tony Scott of thinking too long or too hard.
**
Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani 15A cert, gen release, 128 min
