Cast can’t save ‘Rendition’

At the Movies
By Senitra Horbrook

Rendition is a great conversation piece. You won’t be talking about how extraordinary the movie is (because it isn’t), but about "extraordinary rendition," the United States’ practice of shipping suspected terrorists to countries where anti-torture laws don’t apply.
It’s an interesting subject for a movie, although it may be a little too real and current for audiences. Drawing similarities to The Kingdom, Rendition begins with a terrorist bombing somewhere in North Africa. A CIA agent is killed during the bombing, making the American government ever so focused on nabbing the terrorist(s).
Through some research of telephone records, the CIA thinks it has found the man who could be responsible for the bombing, or at least lead them to the responsible parties. He’s Egyptian-born Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), a man who has been living in the United States since the age of 14 and went to NYU. Making him seem even less like a terrorist is the fact that he’s married to an all-American girl, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), and she’s pregnant with their second child.
The government doesn’t care about any of that. Thinking he’s guilty, CIA bigwig Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep) orders him to be sent to prison overseas for "interrogation." Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the CIA agent stationed at Anwar’s prison to try to get information out of him with the help of secret police chief Abasi Fawal (Yigor Naor). All the while, Anwar continues to maintain his innocence.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, Isabella begins to worry when Anwar doesn’t return from an overseas conference and there’s no record of him getting on a connecting flight from Washington, D.C., to their hometown of Chicago. She enlists former boyfriend Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an aide to a senator (Alan Arkin), to help find out what happened to Anwar, only to be eventually stonewalled by Whitman, who claims they’ve never heard of Anwar El-Ibrahimi.
While thought-provoking, Rendition lacked entertainment value for me. It’s not just because the subject matter is so serious; it’s also because Rendition has too many distracting problems.
For starters, director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) doesn’t use the phenomenal cast to the best of their abilities. With names like Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin, I expected more than cardboard cutouts of people and emotions. Witherspoon is the angry soccer mom demanding to know what happened to her husband. Gyllenhaal is the CIA agent with a conscience, while Streep is the agent without one. Arkin is just a pragmatic senator.
Rendition also spends quite a bit of time switching back and forth between the main story and a secondary subplot about the actual terrorist and his girlfriend, which could have been a movie of its own.
Rendition goes most awry and tries too hard to prove its point during the torture scenes. We repeatedly see the torture that Anwar faces during his "interrogations." He’s stripped down, thrown into a tiny cell, shackled, electrocuted, just to name a few indignities the audience sees.
There’s no doubt these are uncomfortable scenes. One torture scene would have been enough. Unfortunately, they are played out too many times for what I presume to be Hollywood shock-value purposes. ••
Movie Grade: B-