Body of Lies

I just got back from the cinema where I watched the new Ridley Scott movie Body of Lies featuring Russel Crowe and Leonardo Dicaprio. Let me start by saying that this was a pretty solid and very entertaining spy movie. This was not though your usual spy-super gadgety-james bond-sort of film. It was more down to earth, more brutal when it had to and more provocative when it was needed.

I must admit that I did not know alot about the movie before watching it. All I knew was that it was directed and produced by Ridley Scott and what the tv trailer had to offer. The first few minutes I got upset watching Crowe justifying war in Iraq and setting a black and white scenery of bad arabs-good americans. Soon though, it became clear that that was not the case with this movie, mostly because of the conflict between Dicaprio and Crowe with Crowe not being a very likable character. In fact he was very good at not liking him but not quite putting a finger at what was that bothered me most about him. DiCaprio plays a CIA agent who is fluent in arabic and is stationed in Iraq. He keeps himself busy by hunting down Al Qaida terrorists. Crow is his boss and besides bossing him around middle east from the confort of CIA's headquarters, he is not very clear as to his ways.

The film gets you interested in the development until the very end showing you pieces of the script and then has you wandering what the characters would be pulling out of their sleeves to overcome the situation. The action was solid and done very well while adding to the script, rather than leading it, as is the case with the genre. The film responsibly differentiated itself from my initial fears and sets a line between downright fundamentalist terrorists with normal arab people that just want to get on with their lives having been wounded psychologically and/or psychically by conflicts, that were brought upon them. In fact the film goes as far as to state that loving your country does not mean that you are willing to wage a war on another nation just because there are interests there. As superfical as this might be, it is still true and I am very happy that mainstream cinema accepts it rather than showing a black and white view of good westerners and people who work with them and bad everybody else.

Overall a movie worth spending the admission ticket. A movie that is not great in a sense of a great film that will be remembered, but again one that you will thoroughly enjoy from start to finish. At the end, isn't this what movies are about?