Film Reviews

Traitor

• Rating:
• Director: Jeffery Nachmanoff
• Starring: Don Cheadle
• Details: US / 114mins (15A).

Twists usually come towards the end of a movie, a reveal that leaves the audience stumbling out of the theatre; Traitor's twist happens bang on midway through and elevates a so-so plot into the division of decent Middle Eastern thrillers. After watching his father die in a car explosion, devout Muslim Samir Horn (Cheadle) grows up to be a terrorist bomber, despite his mother being American. When he is arrested and thrown in a Yemen prison for selling detonators on the black market, Samir befriends Omar (Taghmaoui), an extremist who introduces him to the hierarchy of a movement with a deadly plan to cause havoc on US soil. Tracking Samir and Omar is FBI agent Roy Clayton (Pearce) and the race is on to stop Samir's deadly plan before lives are lost.

Traitor is really a movie of two halves: the opening half is a pretty ordinary affair with slow pacing and a lack of tension rife, but Jeffery Nachmanoff's screenplay, adapted from Steve Martin's story (yes, that Steve Martin), is only lulling the viewer into a false sense of security before unleashing the twist. Said twist kicks the movie into a higher gear, and from then on no one can guess which way it will turn, turning Traitor into a solid thriller.

However, those expecting the bullets of Body of Lies, the complex narrative of Syriana or the emergency of Rendition, will be disappointed, as Traitor is more of a character piece and that character is the 'conflicted' Samir. Don Cheadle has a knack of making an audience believe the character he's playing (bar his Cockney wide boy in the Ocean's movies) and he's at it again here as an American Muslim, which gives the movie its title, a tough one to pull off with believability.

Review by Gavin Burke