Traitor

The story of Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a man of Sudanese and American parentage, as he navigates the jihadi world. The audience is meant to be in suspense as to whether Samir is a traitor to the jihadis who befriend him, or the American handlers who believe he is inflitrating a terrorist cell.  And Cheadle tries, only somewhat successfully, to convey how conflicted he is. This movie does a lot of things right, the most important being to give a co-starring role Said Taghmaoui, who was so superb in a minor role in Three Kings, and is far and away the most intersting thing about this movie. It paints a fairly gritty picture of the environment that produces suicide bombers, and the underground networks that recruit and nurture them.  The movie also deserves some credit for trying to explain Samir’s motivation in terms of his commitment to, and interpretation of, the Koran. Thus it presents an alternative view of Islam, one that empahsizes non-violence. That said, the movie is dull and efforts to ramp up the tension are limited to making the soundtrack more instrusive. Cheadle is also diappointing, wearing a single dour expression the entire time. He can be so much fun when he flashes a smile and avoids the cockney accent he is weighted down with in the Ocean movies, but here he is largely a cipher, forced to utter a series of earnest but silly lines.