Nobody Politic: A Review of ‘Body of Lies’

Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.

Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.

It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.

With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).

Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.

The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.

Confirming Suspicions: A Review of 'Max Payne'

The Unbearable Boredom of Characterisation: Wahlberg plays the titular cop like he's sitting down playing the original videogame, only with less emoting.

It snows a lot in New York. Unless it’s raining (and then it’s raining a lot). Or if it’s in a caramel-tinted flashback where the dipping sun seems to be positioned just outside every window of happy, family-oriented detective (!) Max Payne’s house. But this glowing, treacle-like existence was a long-time ago, and now Mr Payne is a tortured soul, the city around him evoking his emotional and spiritual frostbite with oodles of pathetic fallacy. Emphasis on the pathetic.

Yes, we’re firmly in hollowed-out-dour-renegade-cop territory with Max Payne, based on the apparently very successful videogame of the same name. As with other such adaptations, the film succumbs to a workmanlike hyper-kineticism and a forgettable blue-black-chrome colour palette which, originally an invocation of ‘serious’ drama, has now been appropriated into the realm of cheap teenage thrills (recent exhibits being Shoot Em Up and Death Race). In fact, much the same slippage could be applied to star Mark Wahlberg, a man not serviced well by playing characters without a sense of humour and constrained to keep their lingo suitable for a 12-certificated crowd.

Investigating his family’s massacre, as well as the subsequent disembowelment of several other unremarkable characters, Wahlberg’s Max Payne uncovers a dangerous pharmaceutical designed for application within the military which turns you into either an invincible super-soldier or leads to the taker suffering visions of apocalyptic fire and brimstone (memories of Constantine’s similarly digital hell-on-Earth). These hallucinations, all swooping devils and searing sparks, occasionally pull a viewer from their stupor, but in making both the screeching judgement day and everyday New York equally stylised and embellished the film surrenders its most original conceit to the deadening onslaught of plot-predictability and slow-motion shotgun blasts (the latter of which continue over the closing credits, magnified to fill the entire screen, the much smaller actor’s names indicating something of a hierarchy of priorities). One need only look to the upcoming Franklyn to see how the wildly strange can mix with a brittle everyday existence far more effectively.

Featuring some unfortunate acting from those from some perversely cast actors (true, we might not expect better from Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to discover anyone desperate for the return of Chris O’Donnell to our screens, while at least Beau Bridges has the excuse of following in his brother’s recent Iron Man footprints), Max Payne seems like a labour of apathy for all those involved, a tired and unnecessary film walking glumly down a well-worn path.