There is a palpable nobility to Traitor, the anxious, tidy terror-era thriller co-written and exec produced by Steve Martin. From the get-go, the movie dares to blur the line between good and bad in its treatment of jihadists vs anti-terror agents. And though it’s too moralistic to be properly ambiguous (basically: manipulating religion in order to kill is ungodly), it’s refreshing to feel a twinge of sympathy for a potential mass-murderer and simultaneously cheer on government agents for whom “acceptable loss” is a playbook go-to.
Two pure hearts keep matters clear for us. One belongs to Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a Muslim of mixed Sudanese/US origin whose experience in the ranks of both the Special Forces and the Mujahideen has put him in the middle of the War on Terror. The other is FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), a Southern Baptist and Arabic scholar who, marble-mouth aside, is the antithesis of a redneck-cop type. Interdepartmental secrecy ensures that Horn and Clayton are on the same team but don’t know it as a massive terror plot brews between Yemen, Marseilles, London and Toronto.
With actors as likeable as Cheadle, Pearce and Saïd Taghmaoui — as the terrorist Cheadle tries to redeem — in the fray, it’s unfulfilling how director/co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff hustles straight for the cops ’n’ bombers action. There’s too much earnest subtext and too little rapid-fire editing for this to function like the Bourne film it seems to want to be at times. Yet as a story suspicious of theocracy and bureaucracy and open-minded about faith and geopolitics, Traitor’s convictions infiltrate and win the day.