Gentle music plays in the background as a boy and his father lovingly interact. The boy gets into a car, which promptly explodes. The music cuts short and the audience is left with an underwater deafness, coupled with intense ringing.
"Traitor" is a fairly run-of-the-mill action/suspense terrorist flick, which in the post-Sept. 11 era audiences have seen a lot of. This is not to say that it is a bad movie, but rather just that we've seen this all before.
Don Cheadle, of "Hotel Rwanda" (2004) and "Traffic" (2000), stars as Samir Horn, an ex U.S. Army Special Forces explosives expert working his way to the rotten core of Islamic terrorism. Has he gone rogue? Is he bad? Is he good?
Opposite Cheadle is Guy Pearce in the role of Roy Clayton, the educated FBI agent, keeping his hot-headed partner, Max Archer (played by Neal McDonough), in check. Clayton is the head of an FBI investigation exploring a possible link between Horn and recent terrorist bombings. The film follows Clayton and his team's pursuit of the questionable criminal around the world.
It seems like Cheadle and Pearce are supposed to develop that smart cop/smart criminal bond, but it never really reaches that point. Pearce just ends up as a foil for Cheadle, a situation which turns into a trite lesson about how every coin has two sides.
The movie approaches this duality through the respective r?©sum?©s of the main characters. Clayton is introduced in an otherwise useless scene on an airplane, in which his partner asks, "Where'd you pick up Arabic?" Pearce explains that he has a Ph.D. in Arabic studies, which his partner has never picked up on.
Horn's introduction consists of a montage set to heavy drum beats, in which an FBI agent looks up from his report with astonishment, saying, "His test scores are off the charts." This r?©sum?© sequence is punctuated by an FBI agent throwing down a stack of papers, exclaiming, "And bingo: you've got yourself a terrorist."
It's not clear if these scenes were used to create two stereotypical foils or to play on the American obsession with discrete units of merit. Perhaps a little bit of both.
The directing, already confined by the standard-order script, was a limiting factor in the cast's overall performance. It was surprising to learn that Steve Martin, an otherwise talented writer, co-wrote the script with Nachmanoff. There is one scene in which Archer punches Horn in the stomach and says, "Oh, I'm sorry; I forgot my 'Bill of Rights' at home!" It would be interesting to see if Martin was the architect behind this gem. Although Martin does usually write well within worn themes, such as "Shopgirl" (2005), he usually approaches them in a bit more humorous or original way.
The structure of the movie makes it difficult to identify or empathize with Horn. In other undercover cop thrillers, the star agent breaks into the glamorous world of organized crime. Organized crime is motivated by things American audiences understand: money and power. This allows an audience to identify with the criminals, and thus understand the undercover cop's temptation to really join the other side.
The closest that "Traitor" came to helping the viewer empathize with the terrorists was a collection of scenes where Horn and his terrorist friend were recruiting young French Muslims. A friendly game of soccer becomes an impassioned sermon, where the most outspoken student is recruited to wear a bomb. The downside is that "Syriana" (2005) already delivered a similar message through an almost identical scene -- so much for creativity.
A good movie should humanize people and ideologies on all sides, even those that might seem inhuman. It is here that "Traitor" falls especially short. This underachievement is understandable, given the politically-charged subject matter, but the film's skirting of the issues marred what could have been a laudable final product.
Somehow, in this lack of humanism, that trite America vs. the world of Islamist extremism duality falls apart. In the end, this mediocre thriller falls flat, leaving the viewer with an underwater performance by a first-rate actor, but not much else.
