Traitor

Following hard on the heels of the cartoon heroics of Body Of Lies, Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s Traitor also deals with America’s undercover “war on terror”, but, it is a pleasure to report, it gives us the dramatic substance and moral complexity that Ridley Scott’s film so disappointingly lacked. The ending is a little too pat, both in plotting and sentiment, but for the large part, Traitor keeps us engaged emotionally and intellectually whilst at the same time delivering plenty of the tension and excitement expected of the action espionage thriller

Based on a story by Nachmanoff and Steve Martin (yes, the balloon-twisting comedian), Traitor benefits from its strong central characterisation. Typically enough, it is focussed around the contrast between Cheadle’s Samir and Pearce’s Clayton, both committed passionately to their chosen paths, both sharing a deep-seated religious background and sense of jusitice. This structure enables the film to engage with the issues on a real, personal level rather than a rhetorical one, although Nachmanoff does pepper the dialogue with some rather didactically-pointed observations, for instance that the during the War of Independence, the Americans were, effectively terrorists to the British Government. Narratively and dramatically, Samir is the more important of the two characters. Cheadle carries the burden with potent calm but Pearce, is also impressively effective in his counter-pointed role, having a self-possessed confidence in his performance that certainly was not evident in his Harry Houdini from last year’s Death Defying Acts. The support cast including Jeff Daniels as a cloak-and-dagger operative and Saïd Taghmaoui, as Omar, Samir's trusting associate are of a comparable quality, their characters bringing other points-of-view into the mix.

If the film has a weave of ideas amd issues unusual for the genre, it is nevertheless a suitably tight-rope tense visceral experience with Samir having a doubled level of threat from the Clayton’s anti-terrorist unit and the terrorists themselves. Nachmanoff gives us the expected action but, mercifully, without the usual ridiculously excessive Bond or Bourne-like effects-for-effects-sake stunts. Although conventional enough Traitor is an action film that wants to engage with real-life and that makes it a superior film of its kind.

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