Don Cheadle stars in the new international thriller Traitor.  Cheadle plays Samir, an arms dealer with dual American/Sudanese citizenship.  He’s as comfortable in Chicago as he is in Syria.  As the movie opens, he’s selling detonators to Islamic radicals.  But he’s not a radical, he’s an opportunist.  He’s drinking RC in this “cola war”.  But during the deal he’s caught in the crossfire and ends up in a Yemen prison.  The FBI informs him that they can use his American citizenship to get him out but he declines to make a deal.  His time in prison leads him to deeper into the world of Islamic terrorism.  His eventual escape leads him even deeper.

Based on a story by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin), Traitor aims to be a tense, psychological thriller.  But it’s an oddly conflicted film.  For all of Traitor’s Jihadist rhetoric, explosions, firefights and fisticuffs, it’s amazingly low-key.  It’s hard to be both a quiet rumination on international terrorism and a thriller.  And while it can be fascinating at times to watch Cheadle’s descent into the world of suicide-bombers, it feels incongruent to the FBI procedural that’s going on in the other half of the film.  Not unlike a McDLT, keeping the hot side hot and the cold side cold, when we put the two sides together all we get is a lukewarm sandwich.

It’s almost as if the director is ashamed of action sequences.  They seem rushed and perfunctory.  Somebody needs to tell him that this is a movie about terrorists and gunrunners, FBI agents and suicide-bombers; it’s ok if things blow up and people shoot at each other.  That’s what happens in this world.  It doesn’t have to be a crutch used to prop up a lazy screenplay.  It doesn’t make your movie cheap or less of an artistic achievement.  Yes, there are lots of big, dumb action movies.  But having action in your movie doesn’t necessarily make it “big and dumb”.  So what we end up with is a film that’s almost all build-up and no pay-off. 

It’s interesting to see the juxtaposition between the terrorists and the FBI agents.  It’s become something of a cliché in cop movies to show that the police aren’t all that different from the criminals.  But this is much fresher territory, so it doesn’t feel as tired when we see that the FBI agent that thinks all Muslims are terrorists is as bad as a terrorist that thinks all Westerners are equally culpable and therefore deserving of death.  Well, maybe not “as” bad.  Granted, racial profiling is a bad thing (and largely ineffectual) but I don’t know that it’s the moral equivalent of a suicide-bombing.  And, to this movie’s credit, it doesn’t try to make that claim.  Unlike many of Hollywood’s recent batch of war movies, this movie doesn’t try to paint America as the villain.  It’s a much more complex film than that.  It knows that it’s not always good guys fighting bad guys.  Sometimes it’s bad guys fighting not-quite-as-bad guys.  And a “good idea” taken to the extreme is still an “extreme idea” regardless of how good of an idea it might have been at that start.  Traitor takes great pains to show us many points on that spectrum.

This is an intelligent, intricately plotted movie that treats its subject matter very seriously.  Unfortunately, it’s just not that much fun.  Cheadle is excellent, as always.  And Guy Pearce, as the FBI agent tracking Cheadle, gives his best performance since Memento. 

The movie throws a few twists at us that, in the hands of a better director, could have bordered on mind blowing.  But everything is presented so matter-of-factly that some of the twist could go almost unnoticed.  There’s a thin line between being subtle and being nonchalant.  This movie plays jump rope with that line.  While it attempts to be an intelligent, thought-provoking thriller, ultimately it can’t decide if it wants to be an action-movie or a term paper.

On a terrorism movie scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Munich and 1 being You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, Traitor gets a 6.