Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe. Written by William Monahan, based on the novel by David Ignatius. Directed by Ridley Scott. (14A) 130 min. Opens Oct 10.
Body of Lies is based on David Ignatius’ 2007 bestseller about an embedded CIA operative in Jordan, played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Departed-issue nervous-mole performance underneath a Departed-issue baseball cap. The script, by Oscar winner William Monahan (The Departed again) pivots on a reliable plot type (the undercover agent who’s in too deep) and touches on such pressing op-ed topics as the ethics of overseas intelligence gathering and the necessities of torture. There is a lot of violence, from large-scale explosions to intimate depictions of hand trauma (as seen in… The Departed). Leo even gets to make eyes at an Iranian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani) in the downtime between exciting embedded-operative activities. And we get an extra-jowly Russell Crowe as DiCaprio’s sneaky, DC-based handler.
This all might make Ridley Scott’s latest sound like a whole lotta movie, which, empirically speaking, is true given its 130-minute running time. And yet there’s absolutely nothing to see here: no new angle on the intricacies of the war on terror, no fresh insight into the moral quandaries of espionage, and certainly no innovative ideas about how to frame such cinematic spy games. Body of Lies feels like a steroidal version of what is referred to in Canadian cinema circles as a “make-work” project: it’s a film with no persuasive reason to exist except for the fact that the director needs to spend a few months away from his various houses. Of course, by this point Scott needs about a hundred million dollars to produce such a glossy non-event — like American Gangster, Body of Lies gives the impression of being remarkably expensive. And, like American Gangster, it seems that all that money couldn’t buy a single vivid or lasting image, or even the fleeting sense that anybody involved has designs on something other than a paycheck.