Fresh from charting the rise and fall of Harlem's first black drug lord in American Gangster, the ever-prolific Ridley Scott purports to take us behind the scenes of the war on terror in this extravagantly mounted espionage thriller.
Looking typically tense throughout, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Roger Ferris, a CIA agent in Jordan who comes up with an ingenious ploy for flushing out a group of jihadists, with the help of his amiably ruthless long-distance boss (a slightly miscast Russell Crowe, with a paunch and a midwestern accent). The screenplay is by William Monahan, who won an Oscar for The Departed (2006) and here gives us more of the same: turf wars, merrily profane dialogue, bluffs and counter-bluffs between men too smart to trust each other for a single instant.
In other ways too, Body of Lies is a familiar kind of Hollywood product, of the kind that tends to appear close to Oscar season - brimming over with gritty location photography, showy character turns and topical themes. Some show is made of plunging the viewer into a dense cloud of moral ambiguity, but this is mostly smoke and mirrors: while the American heroes may employ some dubious tactics, the justice of their cause is never in doubt. Still, a gifted montage filmmaker such as Scott is well placed to suggest how modern communication technologies might function in a supposedly premodern environment; time and again, street-level images of violence and chaos resolve themselves at a distance into abstract patterns of information, to be manipulated by those who know how.
Watch the trailer on
TheVine TV now.
Jake Wilson, Reviewer