As a critique of US policy, Renditionis well meaning but cliched, writes Michael Dwyer.
**
Directed by Gavin Hood. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Omar Metwally, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Igal Naor 15A cert, gen release, 120 min
Rendition takes its title from the creepy euphemism for the practice of abducting suspected terrorists and sending them abroad for torture and interrogation. A line in the screenplay attributes the introduction of the policy in the US to the Clinton administration.
The film's dramatic trigger is a suicide bombing in what is vaguely captioned as north Africa. This causes 19 deaths, one of them American, a CIA operative. The agency responds by subjecting an Egyptian-born chemical engineer, Anwar El-Ibrahim (Omar Metwally), to the full rendition process, even though he was in a very different area of Africa - attending a conference in Cape Town - at the time.
A New York University graduate, El-Ibrahim has been living for 20 years in the US, and is married to an American citizen, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), who is now pregnant with their second child. He is taken prisoner on the flimsiest of evidence, and he passes a polygraph test.
Undaunted, the CIA anti- terrorism chief (Meryl Streep in a glacial portrayal) expresses the view that it's worth the risk of making an error and she claims that thousands of people are still alive in London "because of this". She issues the terse command: "Put him on the plane."
The globe-hopping narrative extends to encompass an idealistic CIA analyst, Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has taken over from his murdered colleague in the unidentified country where the suicide bombing happened. Having enrolled the day after 9/11, the perhaps emblematically named Freeman suffers a crisis of conscience when he has to supervise the relentless torture of El-Ibrahim, who is confined naked in a cramped cell and subjected to water-boarding, electric shocks and physical violence.
Back in the US, the suspect's wife enlists the help of her former college boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard), now the ambitious political aide to an ostensibly liberal US senator (Alan Arkin). And in North Africa the interrogating officer (Igor Naor) is too busy in his torture chamber to notice that his daughter is romantically involved with a radical young Islamic student.
Rendition proves to be a film of two halves. The first is thoroughly intriguing as it sets up its disparate characters and moral complexities. It is at its most effective in dramatising the methodical rendition process and in depicting the horrific abuse meted out to a man regarded as guilty until proven innocent.
In the second half, as Kelley Sane's screenplay attempts to interweave its overlapping narrative strands into a coherent whole, it misguidedly lurches into melodrama and grows increasingly unconvincing as it stumbles towards resolution.
It is not as pretentious or as contrived as Babel, but ultimately is just as superficial in attempting to make an important statement about the state of the world in the post-9/11 era.
Rendition assembles a starry cast, but most of the actors are reduced to playing stock stereotypes with little to do. Witherspoon's sole function is to find different ways of looking worried and distressed, and Gyllenhaal turns on his familiar sad-eyed look to illustrate his character's moral dilemma.
Gavin Hood, the film's South African director, received an Oscar last year for his tough, socially concerned Johannesburg township drama Tsotsi, which was tighter, more clearly focused and more plausible. In Rendition he appears to be caught in a compromise between meaningfully addressing the political issues it raises and the commercial imperatives of making his first Hollywood movie.
