Rendition.

"As the folks at New Line Cinema were quick to point out in an e-mail sent less than an hour after the decision, the Supreme Court last week refused to hear the 'extraordinary rendition' case of Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanon-born German who accused the CIA of kidnapping him in 2003 and flying him to Afghanistan for interrogation and torture," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Rendition is the same Kafkaesque nightmare done in Saturday-Afternoon-at-the-Movies style, with multiple crisscrossing plots, a cliff-hanger climax, and a strong current of hope - that an individual's conscience can triumph over careerism and bureaucratic moral blindness. It's pure Hollywood, but the humanism gets to you."

Updated through 10/19.

"For all its brave rhetoric about 9/11 and the Constitution, Gavin Hood's slick thriller about American outsourcing of terror interrogations is far more interested in the hydraulics of torture in exotic foreign parts than in serious debate about human and civil rights," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"Hollywood kick-starts another Oscar season with a modish globetrotting guilt trip that histrionically explores how government policy and our involvement in the Middle East affects people in America on a personal level," sighs Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "The aura of self-importance that surrounds these tongue-cluckers is an intolerable cruelty, but Gavin Hood's follow-up to the despicable Tsotsi takes the cake."

"Obviously this is an important subject, and indeed I found myself trapped in an infuriating post-screening conversation with a colleague who kept insisting this is a motion picture every American needs to see," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "I argued that the topic demands discussion, but the movie itself is actually really boring and kind of shitty. He claimed such things don't matter - so I guess you all have your marching orders."

"[I]t's well-meaning, liberal-minded, and of serious intent, but completely devoid of nuance," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Premiere's Glenn Kenny: "My frustration with this picture can be summed up by noting that this movie believes its audience is smart enough to put together the fact that one of its several parallel storylines is actually contiguous rather than parallel with the others, but dumb enough to buy the notion that there's an actual country named 'North Africa' on that continent."

Updates, 10/18: "[L]aughably melodramatic and agonizingly inert," finds Nick Schager.

Hood "and writer Kelley Sane have made such a mess of what could have been an urgently topical film that you wonder if they got paid off by Dick Cheney and Ann Coulter to muck things up," sighs Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"There's something depressing about the idea that events such as the abduction and murder of an American journalist (A Mighty Heart), the murder of a returning soldier suffering from PTSD (In the Valley of Elah), and now the extraordinary rendition of prisoners to other countries for purposes of torture, need to be "brought home" any closer than they already are," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "What, exactly, is abstract about the suffering we're confronted with in the news every day? The trade papers like to puzzle over why Iraq- and 9/11-themed films have so consistently failed to draw large audiences, but maybe staying away from these movies is just the public's way of saying, 'Enough!'" At any rate, as for this one, "forget the thin characters and showoffy temporal structure. Rendition's worst flaw is its political deck-stacking, with its willingness to win the viewer's sympathy by showcasing the least defensible instance of extraordinary rendition imaginable."

Updates, 10/19: "Rendition may be earnest, but it is hardly naïve," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, going on to call it "a well-meaning, honorable movie. Which is not to say that it is a very good one. It suffers especially from a familiar kind of narrative overcrowding.... The filmmakers obey the current rule in Hollywood that states that a picture with large themes and a one-word title must also have multiple, chronologically de-centered storylines. (For your consideration: Crash; Syriana; Babel.) But they don't handle the complications very well, and try to pull off a third-act surprise that is less a plot twist than a logical unraveling."

"It is now so well-established that the United States authorizes the practices shown in this film that when President Bush goes on television to blandly deny it with his 'who, we?' little-boy innocence, I feel saddened," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "He may eventually be the last person to believe himself. What the film documents is that we have lost faith in due process and the rule of law, and have forfeited the moral high ground."

"At least by the most cursory checklist standards, Rendition has everything going for it," writes Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. "But maybe that's just the problem: Now that more movies are wrangling with the Iraq war mess specifically, and with the United States' complex and fraught relationship with the Middle East in general, can a checklist of qualities - solid acting! nicely curved dramatic arc! - be enough to cover the more nebulous, smoke-and-mirror-obscured angles of how any of us really feels about the mess we're in?" In contrast, "Maybe A Mighty Heart and Redacted feel so vital to me because they refuse to reorder and reorganize chaos for our safety and convenience."

In the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano finds Rendition "a pat and generic, if serviceable, political thriller."

"Like The Kingdom, which was released in September, Rendition tells parallel stories of an American and an Arab family," notes Christine Smallwood, blogging for the Nation. "If it seems like another ensemble picture of interlocking lives brought together on one fateful day, well, it is. But there's also a twist that changes the picture somewhat at the end. It's a movie that holds you - even the shlocky music can't detract from the power of its images and the drama of the story."

"The filmmakers fail to acknowledge how the world turns to suit [Reese] Witherspoon's will solely because she's well-heeled and well-connected, and they grant zero humanity to power brokers like [Meryl] Streep, who won't let misgivings over torture keep her from sipping another glass of Chardonnay," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "With a cast this stacked, the performances are predictably strong (particularly from [Peter] Sarsgaard, whose slow-burning role recalls his work in Shattered Glass), but the first impression they make is the same as the last."

"Despite the almost unbearable weight of its good intentions, Gavin Hood's film does all the things you want a drama to do: it engages your sympathies, creates suspense, and the narrative is superbly paced (though the denouement delivers a bizarre and totally superfluous twist in the chronology)," writes Robert Hanks in the Independent.

Posted by dwhudson at October 17, 2007 4:51 AM