TGWTG User Blogs

First of all, a thank you to 800 people who viewed yesterday's blog and commented on it. Yes, I know, you probably wasn't commenting on me, but, hey, hopefully some of you are sticking around to read my ravings. Hell, some of you might have even subscribed.

Anyway, here I am writing the first full film review since I first posted those old reviews for Batman Returns and the Eddie Murphy Double Feature.

Rendition
Director: Gavin Hood
Starring: Omar Metwally, Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Peter Saarsgard, Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin.

Near Oscar season, the studios put on hold, at least temporarily, the seemingly endless stream of remakes and comic book adaptations, and occasionally do something original, mostly ripped straight out of newspaper headlines. As most of the headlines in America seem to be about the War on Terror, it makes sense that last Oscar season we seemed to get a gazillion films about terrorism or the government fighting said terrorism. Some of them actually had something so say, whilst others like Rendition simply say "Torturing people is bad". I could have told you that, if you even needed that being told to you, for free without the price of a cinema ticket. But money would be nice.

The plot seems to be attempting to imitate Crash by having a number of interelated storylines that are each tied to each other in some way. Unlike Crash, however, the storyline becomes more convoluted than Vantage Point and slightly less than the average season of 24. Egyptian-American Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is an engineer married to American Isabella (Reese Witherspoon). Anwar is suspected of being a terrorist by the government because he has some phone records that claim he talked with a known terrorist. Thus when he gets back in America, he is promptly arrested and interrogated, but when this turns up nothing, a government official (Meryl Streep) puts him on a plane to North Africa for a more through interrogation, to say the least, which is overseen by a rookie CIA agent (Jake Gyllenhaal). Meanwhile, Isabella suspects something is up, so she calls upon the help of an assistant (Peter Saarsgard) to a major political senator (Alan Arkin). Also, the head torturer's daughter might be dating a terrorist or something. It kind of gets lost in the haze.

See what I mean about convoluted? There are so many plot threads here that it feels like you're watching two films instead of one. Part of the problem is that the plot strand in America never leads anywhere. You could remove a good chunk of it, and it would not even effect the one with Anwar at all. And at the end of it all, there simply is no point to it, other than pad out a script with Oscar moment scenes (you know, the moments they pick to show an actor's performance in clips at the ceremony - traditionally involving them doing some kind of rant or monologue; shouting optional) for the cast.

The film also falls into the typical trap of political movies by being boring. This is not because the film is slow, which it is, but because nothing actually happens half the time, apart from mountains of endless dialogue about other people, who they are and why you should care who they are. But you don't. Director Gavin Hood further complicates the issue by managing to completely mess up a revelation in the third act by confusingly intercutting a flashback (which I didn't even realize it was at first, that's how confusing this was) with a significant but completely unrelated event in the present. This is the man doing the Wolverine prequel, I might add, and somehow I don't think he's the man who should be doing that given what he did here. Hopefully he won't mess up the flashbacks there.

Ah, yes, the cast... The film has not just a great cast, but one that has enough award gold to fill Fort Knox. However, one of the things Rendition does with the dream cast is piss it all away and underuses them. In fact, I'd say Omar Metwally, who turns in a decent performance despite spending the majority of the movie being tortured naked, is probably a bigger part of the movie than all the actors on the poster - and he's not even on it. How's that for wasting your cast? Everyone here is going for cheap attempts at gold or plugging a hole in their schedules. Or paying for a new house.

Jake Gyllenhaal spends most of the movie on the sidelines, watching the tortures with a slightly disturbed/bored expression on his face. Gyllenhaal does eventually come to some use when it comes to the dreaded ending (more on that later), but considering he's the top billed star, that's a dreadful misuse of a good actor. The people who made the film appears to have noticed this and as the film progresses, they make Gyllenhaal look messier and messier, presumably to show his growing conflicting emotions. Instead, however, it had the side effect of making him looking like he's slowly evolving into Nathan Petrelli off Heroes.

Reese Witherspoon looks like the performer most trying to get an Oscar nomination. She's been given a pregnancy, probably in the hopes that this will make the audience sympathetic for her (what a cheap tactic, and one you really shouldn't need if you're making this film right), complete with protruding belly which looks like someone's shoved a cushion up her shirt. It would only look less convincing if it was on a man. Oh, and can you guess that her water will break at a moment of stress? Talk about cliche. She also gets one of the aforementioned Oscar Moments, screaming at Meryl Streep "JUST TELL ME HE'S OKAY!" Her performance isn't bad, but she drowns in cliches that Oscar-bait movies typically provide.

One of my favourite actors, Peter Saarsgard is someone I first saw in Shattered Glass, the "look, Hayden Christensen can act!" movie that about 20 people saw in theatres. I've seen him in some other movies, like Garden State, where he gave decent performances. Except for Flightplan. But I can forgive him for that. Here, he has to spend the movie telling Reese Witherspoon the plot in detail. Saarsgard does what he can, but there's only so much he can do when he has constantly recite the plot like he's reading it out of the film's Wikipedia entry. To add insult to inury, he's hastily written out of the film about the same time I realized that the American storyline was an utter waste of my time.

As for Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin, their performances are so brief, I can do a paragraph on both of them at the same time. Streep gets about 10 minutes, most of the time wandering away from people when they ask her about the case. When she does get to speak, its gloriously bitchy but sadly infrequent. Pity. Alan Arkin shows up for about two scenes in the end, dispensing plot to Peter Saarsgard so Peter Saarsgard can recite it back to Reese Witherspoon. He shows up for about 5 minutes, tops. If you're going in this even for the actors, you're going to be disappointed.

The worst part of the film is how it ends. The aforementioned revelation is improbable and the ending doesn't even have the balls to go for a more daring approach, instead going for the most cliched scenario possible. The ending is so predictable, you can guess it right from that synopsis. It's that obvious. This compounded by some more cliched dialogue ("Get me the Washington Post!" bellows one character down the phone, in a way that almost seems like parody). How Anwar got the calls on his phone? Who knows. Not even the movie offers an answer, just brushing it under the carpet so the ending can be in the land of pixies and elves. The movie doesn't even consider for a second Anwar might be an actual terrorist either, which could have explored some more interesting moral questions than the simple ones that the film offers.

Don't get me wrong, there are bits about the film that are done well. As I've stressed, the performances are good in spite of script that lets everyone down and the film's scenes in North Africa have a gloriously sandy look to them that fits well. The torture scenes are well-done and painful without becoming Hostel. But at the end of the day, the film is a massive disappointment, made even more so by the fact that this is a film that it had so much potential it hurts. It could have been a contender... Instead it ends up as a pretender. For shame.

A flagging, flop-stung New Line had this pegged as their Oscar bet last year. After a 47% on Rotten Tomatoes and no Oscar nominations, New Line was absorbed into Warner Bros. as a genre label to churn out horror movies, comedies and black cinema. What does that say?

2.5/5