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Rendition. Vantage Point. The Kingdom. Many films have been made about the war on terror in recent years. Their directors, earnest and passionate, pop up on television and in newspaper interviews to talk about how the topic is so urgent, so important, with such great consequences for global security. Who could disagree? And yet, almost without exception, these sober and serious dramas have tanked at the box office. The public, it seems, would prefer to stay at home for Strictly Come Dancing.

While sitting through Body of Lies, the new Ridley Scott film about, yes, the war on terror, my thoughts also started to drift. To John Sergeant, and to the idea of him, togged up in camouflage gear, armed with assault weapons, sprinting and dancing through the blazing streets of Basra in order to take out some maniacal insurgent. Silly perhaps, but no sillier than anything in this muddled and banal action thriller.


Leonardo DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, a tough-nut CIA operative who moves through the Middle East sniffing out radical jihadists. His latest assignment, prompted by a devastating explosion in Manchester, England, is to hunt down a particularly fiendish terrorist called Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul) who, in order to increase his chances of staying hidden from the secret services, chooses not to take credit for the atrocities he has masterminded.

Ferris, with only partially useful help from his boss Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) back in the States, but some very nifty data-robbing moves engineered by an eccentric hacker (Simon McBurney), establishes a fictitious terror cell which has consequences both bad (an innocent architect, whose identity is stolen, gets killed) and good (Al-Saleem emerges from the shadows).

Adapted by William Monahan (The Departed) from a novel by David Ignatius, the story definitely has promise. It also poses an interesting question: of what use is the super-sophisticated, super-expensive surveillance and military hardware employed by the Americans if the men they're tracking decide to communicate face-to-face rather than through mobile phones or digital devices?

The answer is meant to lie with the character of Ferris. He speaks Arabic fluently, has a respect for the societies and cultures in which he circulates that is not at all shared by Hoffman, and, in his growing affection for a half-Iranian nurse called Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), seems on the brink of going native. Only he has the chops to penetrate Islamist groups at ground level.

There's a problem, though: Ferris is impossible to take seriously. DiCaprio's Arabic accent is almost as shaky as his Afrikaner accent in Blood Diamond. Mostly, he talks in English. Or rather, he yells in English while he wanders through dusty bazaars wearing a Bluetooth. Wouldn't the locals be a mite suspicious? He's pasty-white and sports a beard that looks like the pelt of a diseased rodent: wouldn't bystanders be staring and sniggering at him?

DiCaprio is no action hero. The scenes in which he chases various suspects through mazy back streets full of market stalls and washing lines seem half-baked compared with similar sequences in The Bourne Ultimatum. Make-up artist Sian Grigg works overtime daubing him with cuts and bruises - one close-up shows a nurse extracting collateral bone fragments that have punctured his arm - but he's more effective as a courter than as a combatant.

The semi-romantic interludes when he's trying to disarm Aisha's sister offer welcome relief from the general atmosphere of gung-ho huffing and puffing; they're also a reminder of the charm and gallantry that brought him superstar status in the first place.

No film starring Russell Crowe (except for A Beautiful Mind) is ever going to be entirely worthless. But, for the most part, he phones in his performance here. Literally: having, for reasons that are unclear, piled on 50 pounds for this role, his character spends nearly all his time at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, taking his kids to school and pottering about at home. We're denied the pleasure of seeing him jockey and joust, man-to-man, with Ferris.

Body of Lies - such an awful title; so redolent of a straight-to-video porno - is, after Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven, the third in Scott's recent trilogy of films dramatising the conflict between the West and countries in the Middle East and in Africa. Any serious points he had to make about those relationships are lost amid the shoot-outs, explosions and roaring-helicopter chase scenes.

Scott, at heart, is a pyrotechnician rather than a political philosopher. Sometimes, during the scenes when he shows graphic acts of torture, he seems like a two-penny shock merchant, too.

Mark Strong stands out for the understated cruelty and sensuality with which he invests his Jordanian intelligence chief Hani Salaam. Farahani, too, shines in what is a very limited role. But they can't save a film that, however worthy its intentions may once have been, soon degenerates into very ordinary and unilluminating fare.
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