Features > Movie Reviews > Body of Lies…

Scripted by William Monaghan (who wrote The Departed and Kingdom of Heaven) from a novel by David Ignatius (like Monaghan, a political journalist), the movie aspires to be less James Bond and more Syriana – with a handful of Jason Bourne set pieces thrown in. But while it does have some shrewd things to say about the state of the so-called war on terror, in the end it doesn’t have the depth or the excitement to do justice to either ambition.

DiCaprio and Crowe: those names look good together on the poster, and when the movie brings them together, yes, they do bring up their game. But mostly they’re exchanging barbs in different time zones and on different continents. Crowe might as well be playing a telephonist.

Instead he’s Ed Hoffman, the senior CIA supervisor tasked with keeping the world safe for democracy and an eye on DiCaprio’s field agent, Roger Ferris, a Middle East specialist who roams between Iraq, Syria, Dubai, Turkey and Jordan. While Ferris is often enough in the line of fire, Hoffman usually has his feet up on his desk; or he’s grumpily driving his kids to their next appointment. Even so, he’s the reactionary Republican type, and Ferris, he begins to suspect, is a bit of a bleeding heart: “You need to decide which side of the cross you’re on,” he warns him. “I need nailers, not hangers."

Definitely an Obama man, Ferris takes a more nuanced view. He is all for talking to terrorists first, and not shooting them unless it’s absolutely necessary. He speaks Arabic, wears a scrawny beard to fit in, and in one of the movie’s more aggravating miscalculations, he starts courting a nurse, Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), whose main function is to prove that Arabs aren’t just people; they’re also convenient pawns when it comes to engineering a good old fashioned melodramatic ending.

This love story never feels real and only makes Ferris look naïve. It’s also unnecessary, because we can already see that the agent is smitten with Jordanian security chief Hani – played by the British actor Mark Strong (last seen as Tom Wilkinson’s right hand man in RocknRolla). Poised and debonair, Strong not only outclasses his two more famous costars, he also delivers a convincing demonstration of what a genuinely smart anti-Terrorist policy would look like – one where bribery replaces torture as the key to intelligence-gathering. All he asks of Ferris in return for cooperation is complete honesty – now why would a CIA man have a problem with that?

Scott has such a good time showing off all the latest hi-tech spy surveillance gadgetry and laying out the geopolitical complexities of this arena that it’s well into the second half before the plot gets going. With the help of computer whiz Simon McBurney, Ferris sets up an innocent architect as a rival terrorist mastermind, figuring this will flush out the genuine al-Qaeda fish that they’re really after. It’s an ingenious idea in as far as it goes, but it’s a bit ridiculous that a terrorist would leave his email address after a bombing, and Ferris doesn’t seem to have thought through the consequences.

The pay-off also comes up short: it’s a post 9/11 variation on the heroine kidnapped by the bad guy and tied to the railway tracks. With a little torture and beheading on the side.

So is Body of Lies worth seeing? Well, as you would expect from Ridley Scott, it looks superb. It’s good to see DiCaprio and Crowe together again for the first time since The Quick and the Dead (and how long ago that feels!), even if their scenes together are too few and far between. Mark Strong makes a vivid impression – the kind that will probably propel him into a lot more big budget movies (I could see him as a Bond villain). And it’s good to see a thriller with a more sophisticated view of the Islamic world than just “them and us”. If I’ve succeeded in lowering your expectations some, then you’ll probably enjoy it all the more.