This terrorist saga comes off as dull too often

If you want to humanize the war on terror, you'd better cast a more complicated actor than Don Cheadle. Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's political drama Traitor puts its star and the audience through stress positions—now so familiar—but rarely makes us feel more rattled than if someone was pelting us with feathers. Co-starring Guy Pearce, the name-brand cast might lure in those not burned out on post-9/11 flicks, but A-list stars haven't helped the rest of the lot, either.

Cheadle plays Samir Horn, a Muslim Sudanese American who lost in father in a car bomb before he was old enough to get behind the wheel. Now Samir's left the States after getting discriminatorily fired from the U.S. Special Ops squad and pops up on the government's radar after he’s arrested selling detonators to terrorists. For half the movie, FBI agent Roy Clayton (Pearce, with a syrupy drawl) tracks Samir and Samir’s new BFF Omar (Said Taghmaoui), an Al Qaeda-esque higher up, across the globe from prison breakouts to embassy explosions. We're meant to be in suspense about Cheadle's inner wickedness, but c'mon—it's Don Freaking Cheadle. The man would be more comfortable playing Joan of Arc than Robert Mugabe. The big reveal is that he's a deep undercover double agent under Jeff Daniels. That Daniels’ agent conveniently neglects to mention it to Pearce at any of their briefings is preordained. The real dramatic crises should be how many victims bomb expert Cheadle is willing to expend to worm his way closer to the top terrorist mastermind. Yet Cheadle's inner struggle is enigmatic—he's a noh mask who accords himself only one instance of the sniffles.

Still, what's dull about the globetrotting thriller isn't solely Cheadle's Oscar-seeking stiffness. It's hard to fault him for being flat when the script is determined to reduce its people to platitude-spouting symbols who expound their philosophies in the near-identical repetitive poetry of southern preachers. Proclaims one, "Terrorism is theatre, and theatre is always performed for an audience.” The only blunt voice belongs to Pearce's partner Max (Neal McDonough), a hybrid of Dick Cheney and Ted Nugent given to bumper-sticker incendiaries like "Arrest All the Muslims!" and "Sorry, left my Bill of Rights at home." Nachmanoff's clinical approach puts a gulf between us and his characters that cinematographer J. Michael Muro's in-your-face verite camera work can't narrow.

Pearce has a few moments where a personality shines through, but he's overwhelmed by the fast, noisy pressures of a film shot in 17 cities and on three continents. Better developed are Cheadle's vengeful co-conspirators, debonair and sympathetic Omar, who passingly mentions his Euro boarding school, and more violent Fareed (Aly Khan), who twists the Koran to reinterpret an allowance about disguising their religion to persecutors into an excuse to eat bacon and quaff champagne. We might not know why they fight, but we at least know their moral code. More questionable is a scene in which Nachmanoff cuts between a half dozen American-based Muslims listening to a high-alert news broadcast about dangerous undercover operatives. Initially, we interpret it as a dig against racial profiling. Later, when these students and baristas are revealed as terrorists, what would this shallow, if well-meaning film have us conclude?

Distributor: Overture
Cast: Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce
Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff'
Screenwriters: Jeffrey Nachmanoff and Steve Martin
Producers: Don Cheadle, David Hoberman, Kay Liberman, Todd Lieberman, Chris McGurk, Danny Rosett and Jeffrey Silver
Genre: Thriller
Rating: PG-13 for intense violent sequences, thematic material and brief language
Running time: 110 min.
Release date: August 27