Rendition

A currently topical subject matter Rendition has now hit the movie screen. It revels the dark, murky, shifting events of the espionage world and their barbaric interrogation methods. The cast consists of Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard, Omar Metwalley. Through inattention or because of sub tiles, I had some difficulty piecing together the Arab side of the story. The U.S. story was straight forward. It involves an Egyptian American, Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwalley), married to Caucasian American (Reese Witherspoon). Anwar is fingered by the CIA (Meryl Streep) as a terrorist on the flimsiest of evidence and flown to a Middle East country to be interrogated. Gyllenhaal plays a CIA analyst who comes to question the U.S. government's sanctioning of the practice, and turns whistle blower. The one high light of the movie is Alan Arkin a U.S. Senator dressing down his subordinate in his office, it is an intense filled moment of reality. Apart from Arkin’s momentary performance it is a rather ho hum film. And “Yes” the U.S. does not torture, it just sub contracts.