Body of Lies opens with a bang and the explosions keep on coming. It begins in a bleak district of Manchester, England, where a SWAT team prepares its assault on a terror cell's hideout with quiet efficiency. Meanwhile the building's tenants, followers of the fictional bin Laden associate Al Saleem, are watching a video on martyrdom narrated by their leader as they tinker with explosives. The young terrorists greet the entrance of the police into their den with calm resolve. Shouting "God is great!" they trigger the explosion that scatters fire and debris as their building is blown into the surrounding neighborhood.
Director Ridley Scott is no stranger to thought-provoking action movies. Whether set in the future (Alien), the past (Gladiator) or the present (Blackhawk Down), his best films have always brought the technical and narrative power of Hollywood to bear on interesting, occasionally fascinating themes.
Although not without its moments, Body of Lies falls below Scott's best efforts. The director chose a channel surfing approach for his war on terror story that undercuts traditional storytelling without adding new insight. Jumping restlessly from country to country and continent to continent, the plot and motivations of Body of Lies come at the viewer like two hours of CNN with changing anchors, cuts to faraway trouble spots and a round robin of little facts delivered by a running crawler.
Understanding is less important than the visual impressions-the expansive squalor of a Palestinian refugee camp, the noise and grit of a Baghdad street and the all-seeing eye of the circling American surveillance drones, whose cameras see much less than their handlers had hoped. And yes, there are explosions, fiery explosions.
The stars of Body of Lies, Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, play CIA agents with conflicting methods. Venturing only occasionally into the field and preferring to direct the world from his war room in Langley, Va., Hoffman (Crowe) is arrogant and coarse though not without a redeeming insight here and there. Crowe seems to be channeling Fred Thompson for his grumpy bear role, though the Border States accent slips too often toward the Australian Outback. Hoffman is a multi-tasker, packing his kids off to school while expounding his plan to crush Al Quaeda on his cell phone. Like most multi-taskers, his many accomplishments are largely mediocre.
By contrast, agent Ferris (DiCaprio) is among the more intelligent members of the intelligence community. He prefers to keep his feet on the ground of the world's hot spots, valuing what he can see up close over prefabricated theories and photographs from 3,000 feet in the air. Ferris and Hoffman are working together in the movie's zigzagging, elliptical way to locate the mysterious fanatic Al Saleem, though they are often at cross-purposes. Like Crowe, DiCaprio has trouble keeping his accent buttoned down. Ferris is from North Carolina but sounds more like a son of the Midwest.
Perhaps the most fascinating character in Body of Lies is Jordan's elegant spymaster Hani, played with fierce pride and unctuous duplicity by Mark Strong. Responsible for the internal security of his kingdom, Hani is determined to thwart Islamic fundamentalist political movements. He dismisses the usefulness of torture and has no patience for blustering, bumbling Americans. Hani dismisses Hoffman with polite contempt but forms a dangerously mercurial bond with Ferris.
Body of Lies evades taking particular stands on the issues it rifles through. One gathers that murder in the name of Islam is wrong and that America is still the world's greatest country, despite being served by men of Hoffman's middle caliber. The improbable romance between Ferris and a beautiful Iranian refugee nurse seems Scotch-taped to the plot, more an exercise in trying to humanize Ferris than to attract a date night demographic.
