CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Peter Saarsgaard, Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep SCR: Kelley Sane DIR: Gavin Hood STUDIO: New Line Cinema MPAA: R for torture/violence and language. RUNNING TIME: 120 min. OFFICIAL SITE: http://www.renditionmovie.com IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804522/ Rendition is, for the most part, what you'd expect it to be: little more than a two hours of Hollwood pabulum about why war is bad and hurting people is wrong. The message itself isn't a bad one, but that the movie never reaches much past the message, which makes for lackluster entertainment. Despite a few well-earned moments of surprise there is little to like about the film. Kelley Sane's ambitious style of interwoven stories, which worked so well in movies like Traffic and Crash, really falls flat here. The lack of a definite protagonist leaves the film drifting. Rather than ratcheting up the tension for the inevitable collision, the story becomes plodding. Inevitably the characters do collide, but the impact is anti-climactic. When Arch-conservative CIA agent Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) is confronted by Washington insider Alan Smith (Peter Saarsgaard) about the kidnapping around which the story revolves, her rhetoric is tired and weak, mere lip service to the conservative perspective. It's almost as if since the screenwriter believed that no argument could justify torture, there was no reason to even try and imagine a good one for the movie. The movie never provides much in the way of explanation for why the main character Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), the Egyptian husband of American Isabella “Izzy” Field El-Abrahimi, (Reese Witherspoon), is abducted and tortured. The way the movie portrays it, the decision to kidnap and torture people is no more than a whim based on a hunch by people very far away from the violence they order. That may very well be the truth, but it didn't make for much of a movie. As it stands the movie's antagonists, war-mongering Washington insiders, are little more than straw men set up for even weaker heroes to knock down. The movie never questions its own righteous assumptions by examining situations where the use of extremes might be called for. It's easy to say torture is wrong when we know they've got the wrong man and there are no lives on the line, but what about situations where they've got the right man and there are definitely lives on the line? A situation where the necessary bureaucracy of a criminal trial will definitely mean the loss of many innocent lives, and the last resort is torture? There are many scenarios that could have explored the moral ambiguity of torture in a more nuanced and transfixing way, but this film opted to go for the low-hanging fruit of easy criticism rather than break ground and truly explore the issue. There are certainly moments worth watching. Jake Gyllenhaal's unexpected humor lightens an otherwise unrelentingly dark film, and the film's twist is come by honestly. But despite the dazzling cast, the movie never really leaves the ground. Given its difficult subject matter it would have been nice to see a more sophisticated and less biased look at the use of torture in the War on Terror, instead we'll have to settle for more preaching. --reviewed by ADAM BLODGETT