MOVIE REVIEWS: RENDITION

MOVIE REVIEWS: RENDITION

Gavin Hood's thriller Rendition concerns an Egyptian-born American who suddenly disappears after attending a conference in South Africa. We learn he was arrested by the CIA, then flown to an unnamed country where he is subjected to "expert" torture. A.O. Scott anticipates that the film will likely be attacked as anti-American. "It is, after all, much easier to rant and rave about treacherous Hollywood liberals than to think through the moral and strategic questions raised by some of the policies of the American government," he writes. And while acknowledging that the film "could have used more subtlety," Scott concludes: "But all its clumsy efforts are toward an honest and difficult goal, which is to use the resources of mainstream movie-making to get viewers thinking about a moral crisis that many of us would prefer to ignore." Writing in the New York Daily News, Jack Mathews calls the movie, "one of the most important 'message' movies of the year." Likewise Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail remarks, "Rendition is a rarity -- a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying." But writing in the New York Post, Kyle Smith, probably a rare conservative among film critics, comments, "Rendition has the depth of a bumper sticker without the brevity." He refers to a studio press release which quotes director Gavin Hood as saying: "The one thing [the screenwriter] and I didn't want to do was to tell the audience what to think." Comments Smith: "He must be referring to some other film. This one has a hero who says, 'If you torture one person, you create 10, a hundred, a thousand new enemies' and concludes that Islamist terrorism is a regrettable but understandable response to the actions of intelligence agencies. Art is supposed to hold a mirror up to reality -- but not one borrowed from the funhouse."

19/10/2007