Double-Cross Doldrums

It’s been almost seven years since 9/11, but Hollywood still hasn’t figured out how to make a movie about terrorism. In part, that’s the result of not trying: While moviegoers have been barraged with movies digging into the Iraq War, the territory surrounding the topic of terrorism — its origins, its motivations, its methods, its effects — has been left, with just a few exceptions, noticeably fallow. From Sleeper Cell to The Kingdom to TV's 24, only a handful of productions have dealt with the subject directly, and even those have tended to resort either to easy action kicks or ho-hum attempts at balance that end up telling us nothing.

Traitor, a terrorism thriller dumped into the end-off-summer doldrums, falls squarely into the latter category. Stolid, vague, and unremarkable, the film sharpens the case that Hollywood not only doesn’t understand terrorism, it doesn’t much want to, either.

Instead, Tinseltown's serious set simply wants to appear as if it’s trying. That's an important distinction to make: On the one hand, there's little interest in examining or unpacking the genuine complexities and uncertainties of global terrorism; on the other hand, there's plenty of interest in demonstrating a superficial awareness that it is, indeed, complicated — and, of course, and in being recognized for saying so.

So Traitor fights hard for its weighty, issue-movie cred, always making sure to put on its best Solemn, Grave, and Melancholy face; there's no chance anyone will confuse these glum proceedings with anything as trivial as summer entertainment. And it treads carefully through the motions of its pointless, overly convoluted plot, avoiding anything that might seem too exciting, too moving, or too thrilling — never mind that the film is, at least ostensibly, a thriller.

Most of the actors seem on-message too. As the film's lead, a potentially sympathetic terrorist named Samir Horn, Don Cheadle keeps things reliably dour and down; he spends most of the movie looking as if he's just attended a funeral for his puppy. If the film has a strong point, it's Guy Pearce, who turns in all the movie's best scenes as the investigator hunting down Horn. Pearce has always been a top-notch, if underused, performer, and here he stalks through the movie like a wolf on the prowl — gaunt, trim, suspiciously eyeing everything around him as if ready to pounce. Jeff Daniels shows up a few times as a surly intelligence operative to throw a wrench into the story, but he registers more as a plot device than a character. Meanwhile, Max Archer, a talented character actor with the unfortunate gift of being able to spit out mouthfuls of who-cares details in less than completely mind-numbing fashion, is once again called upon to play the thankless role of the Expository Sidekick — the go-to character every time some flat factoid necessary to the plot needs to be conveyed.

Needless to say, a large part of the problem is the woefully inadequate script by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who also directed. The dialog veers between exposition as clunky as a wagon on the Oregon Trail (pretty much every line uttered by Archer), painfully obvious metaphorical blather (playing chess, one terrorist gravely intones, "You must be willing to sacrifice some of your pawns if you want to win."), faux-macho back-and-forths that would embarrass the writers of a third-rate cable cop show ("We know everything about you. Even what’s on your iPod."), and vague generalities intended to convey meaningfulness ("I need to know the truth!" "The truth is complicated.").

File that last line under "keep digging, Watson." The truth, especially when it comes to terrorism, is most assuredly complicated. Unfortunately, the movie makes almost no attempt to explain how. Rather than showing us the complexities of international terrorism, it contents itself with simply repeating — in various, tedious ways — that it's really, really, really... complicated. The result is a movie that's all introduction but no development. Indeed, watching Traitor often feels like reading a B-grade term paper: The topic’s got potential, and it's assembled competently (if not excitingly). But, despite its obvious labors, it never quite figures out what it wants to say: only that it very much wants to say something.

Admittedly, there are occasional flashes of understanding, if not insight. "Terrorism is theater, and theater is performed for an audience. Ours is America," one of the film’s murderous masterminds informs his fellow conspirators as they plan an attack. It's a bloated, painfully pretentious line, but as anyone who’s turned on the news in recent years is surely aware, terrorists have indeed figured out how to put on show after awful, bloody show. They’ve mastered the terrible art of violence as performance. Too bad that, when it comes to portraying such acts, Hollywood — for all its vaunted expertise at performance and showmanship — is still mostly clueless.

Peter Suderman is the arts and entertainment editor of Culture11.com.

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