Rendition
Studio: New Line Cinema
Rated: R
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally
Director: Gavin Hood
WorkNameSort: Rendition
Our Rating: 3.50
In Rendition, Omar Metwally plays Anwar El-Ibrahimi, a 20-year-resident of the U.S. who’s successfully parlayed his Ivy League chemical-engineering education into a $200,000-a-year consulting job. After a bomb goes off on a busy city street in North Africa (the filmmakers go to great lengths to avoid saying “Morocco,” but whatever), killing a CIA agent, the agency chief (Meryl Streep) demands answers. Anwar just happens to be on a flight from South Africa to Washington, D.C., and before you can say “waterboarding for freedom,” he’s got a bag over his head and is in a Moroccan jail. CIA agent Doug Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) oversees the torture – and he’s the only one with the balls to use that term, but then he is drunk at the time – while El-Ibrahimi’s wife (Reese Witherspoon) lip-quivers her way through Washington trying to find out what’s going on. Evil is personified in the film by Streep’s character, a one-dimensional, right-wing zealot, and the Moroccan prison chief (Yigal Naor)is the film’s most intriguing and nuanced character; he ties the disparate elements together, even though Gyllenhaal ends up with the glory. The movie makes its points often and bluntly, but by crafting an intricate and engaging story out of this country’s most despicable “weapon” in the war on terror, it’s possible that its message may be more well-received than the dozens of damning documentaries that have preceded it.
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2007.