Body of Lies, round 1.

"With Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio interpreting a script by William Monahan (The Departed), Body of Lies puts on prominent display deceptions, betrayals and dispensable attitudes toward humanity that might be essential to United States intelligence work overseas, but that seem particularly challenging at a time when studios appear happy to mollify audiences with hormone-based comedies and superhero epics. It's true that some classics of American cinema, like Chinatown and the Godfather films, have taken the darkest view of power and human nature. But those films come out of a Hollywood that seems long gone. Body of Lies is as nostalgic in its moral ambiguity as it is immediate in its subject matter." John Anderson talks with director Ridley Scott, Donald De Line (one of the producers), DiCaprio and David Ignatius (who wrote the book the movie's based on) for the New York Times.

Updated through 10/10.

"[C]ontrived phony-baloney," declares Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Coming on like an inside account of CIA operations against jihad-minded terrorists, pic shows its true colors by featuring a shootout, chase or big explosion every 10 minutes or so, on its way to a climax so conventional it would have been at home in a 1940s Warner Bros melodrama.... Due to Scott's clear interest in West vs Arab conflict, explored in both Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven, novelist and journalist Ignatius' intimate knowledge of the scene and scenarist William Monahan's proven skill with complicated narratives and pungent dialogue, there was reason here to hope for something more than an updated companion piece to Ridley's brother Tony's 2001 espionage meller Spy Game."

Mike Goodridge, reviewing the film for Screen Daily, is more impressed: "Ridley Scott employs all his cinematic tricks to craft a heart-thumping action thriller in Body of Lies, which blends thematic elements of Syriana, Rendition and The Kingdom and then churns them through a high octane Bourne blender.... Scott and his brilliant editor Pietro Scalia are expert at creating a visual patchwork of images that maximizes the tension in every scene."

"Here is a landscape of deserved paranoia and horrific violence, of countless life-or-death scenarios, total distrust of enemies and allies alike and open contempt for anything American - again not undeserved," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "To be sure, the film retains familiar genre elements: It has double crosses and plot twists, a romance - an improbable one - chases, gunfights and last-minute rescues. But the fiction is rooted in a Middle Eastern reality that is always grim and unsettling."

Updates, 10/6: "Ridley Scott flips back and forth from Washington to the Middle East, from drone surveillance to the street, from explosions and scenes of torture to men tearing across the desert with guns blazing," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "But the movie is smart and tightly drawn; it has a throat-gripping urgency and some serious insights, and Scott has a greater command of space and a more explicit way with violence than most thriller directors... Best of all, Scott, after all these years, has become a good director of acting."

"The movie isn't witty or memorable, but it keeps you on edge, and it's the first war-on-terror film to weave its anti-US politics so deeply into the narrative that the characters don't need to speechify," writes David Edelstein in New York.

Update, 10/7: "io9 has confirmed an earlier report that Ridley Scott will direct an adaptation of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's classic dystopian future novel," notes Kevin Buist at the SpoutBlog. "Scott says that Leonardo DiCaprio approached him about adapting the book, and it looks like he will star in the film as well. This is exciting news; not only does it herald the return to science fiction for the director of Blade Runner and Alien, it also means that Leo, who is working on a live action adaptation of Akira, has two dystopian future projects in progress."

Updates, 10/8: "Body of Lies comes carrying all sorts of familiar spy-movie baggage, from its cyclorama of exotic Middle East locations to the inevitable climax (by far the film's most conventional stretch) in which things suddenly turn personal for our ostensible hero and his grafted-on romantic interest (a comely Jordanian-Iranian nurse played by Golshifteh Farahani)," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "But its generic attributes (and title) notwithstanding, Scott's film may be the sharpest of all the post-9/11 thrillers - and also the most purely entertaining - in the way it maps the vectors and currents of the modern intelligence-gathering game without losing us in its dense narrative thicket. Even more refreshingly, Scott and Monahan don't feel obliged to keep up a p.c. balance of Arabs good and bad, Americans ideologically pure and bankrupt."

"Body of Lies is basically just another globe-hopping, edge-of-the-seat war-on-terror thriller, or whatever hyped-up hyphenate you prefer, and as such more memorable than, say, Traitor, but less so than, say, the Bourne movies," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "It's a pithy testimony of Scott's powers and his limits."

Updates, 10/9: "[T]he Hollywood Surge still isn't working," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC, where he also considers DiCaprio.

For the Los Angeles Times, Michael Ordoña profiles Mark Strong.

"Paul Newman's passing casts a shadow over Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe's performances in Body of Lies," argues Armond White in the New York Press. "This spy/mercenary flick feels like a eulogy - a slick, cynical death knell—for Newman's ideal: the morally charismatic movie star."

Updates, 10/10: "Body of Lies raises a potentially disturbing question," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "If terrorism has become boring, does that mean the terrorists have won? Or, conversely, is the grinding tedium of this film good news for our side, evidence of the awesome might of Western popular culture, which can turn even the most intransigent and bloodthirsty real-world villains into fodder for busy, contrived and lifeless action thrillers?"

Slate's Dana Stevens: "Certain moments are contractually required to happen in a movie like this: Camels will plod across the horizon as a woman's voice wails in Arabic on the soundtrack. An expensive-looking aerial shot will soar over CIA headquarters in Langley, Va, as a legend on the screen's lower left spells out, 'Langley, Virginia.' Jeeps will explode in the desert. Leonardo DiCaprio's forehead will perspire in extreme close-up. I will consult my watch."

"Scott's latest is first and foremost beholden to dull thriller conventions, the majority of which are staged with minimal flair and, worse still, cut off any further political commentary at the knees - unless, that is, one considers revelatory the fact that espionage involves deception," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Body of Lies is excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that's unnecessarily confusing to follow," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "It's all a ruse to get us to believe he's giving us some deep truth."

"Scott has a bad habit of making films whose handsomeness almost, but doesn't quite, hide their shortcoming," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "Like last year's American Gangster, Body of Lies has elements of greatness in it but never quite performs the alchemy needed to convert them, settling instead for mere goodness. Still, it's not like the screens are so flooded with decent movies that we couldn't use another, particularly a timely, clear-eyed thriller about the Middle East and the role of the US therein."

"Body of Lies contains enough you can believe, or almost believe, that you wish so much of it weren't sensationally implausible," writes Roger Ebert in the Sun-Times.

"Does Roger-Leo conquer the evildoers?" asks Richard Corliss in Time. "We'll never tell. But as for Body of Lies conquering the audience, demonstrating that a film can be true to knotty issues of counterterrorism and still lure the masses with updated spy-movie thrills: mission ... well, nearly but not quite accomplished."

"It's an exciting movie, done in the flashy, breath-catching hyper-visual mode we expect from Scott," writes Michael Wilmington at Movie City News. "But in the end, it gets bogged down: trapped in the kind of schmaltzy, preachy, predictable climax we don't expect from scriptwriter William Monahan."

The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan finds it "always crisp and watchable. But as the film's episodic story gradually reveals itself, it ends up too unconvincing and conventional to consistently hold our attention."

"In the end, it is an above-average entertainment, though not a terribly memorable one," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "By contrast, a sequel following the exploits of spymaster Hani Salaam, the George Smiley of Jordan - now that, my dear, would be something to see."

"Last year's American Gangster and now the spy-by-numbers Body of Lies reveal an oddly generic filmmaker, gifted with huge budgets and high-profile talent but lacking a signature," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

James Rocchi at Cinematical: "I found myself asking one simple question during Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, a well-shot, big-name intelligence thriller that sees Leonardo DiCaprio's CIA man caught up in action in the Middle East - namely, what is Body of Lies for? I don't mean that in the sense of asking what it supports or believes in - although, with the film's mix of Hollywood heroics and sneering cynicism, you're certainly left with that question - but rather in the sense of asking what it is that Body of Lies means to accomplish or communicate."

"The problem is that the film does such a good job of establishing Ferris's motives early on that we don't believe the story when his motives suddenly change," writes J Robert Parks at Daily Plastic. "I spent far too much of the final 45 minutes asking, 'Why is he doing that?,' and not coming up with a satisfactory answer.... It's all relatively watchable, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit disappointed."

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2008 4:48 AM