BEFORE: Meryl Streep carries over from "Music of the Heart" and she'll be here tomorrow as well for the last film of March. You can kind of see my original plan here, this spy film was meant to accompany "Breach", and tomorrow's film is music-related, so that was supposed to go next to "Music of the Heart", but a better linking situation arose, so I had to flip things around a little bit.
Linking has now been extended to July 4, maybe even a couple days after that. Right now my chosen film for July 4 is falling on July 2, if I don't take any breaks except for a few days off in May. When I get to June 30, I can either take another two days off, or I can keep looking for more films that feature my linking actors, those that can be dropped into the plan somewhere, I only need to find two more to make things in July line up perfectly. We'll see, I've got a few options.
As of now, I'm planning to work the following theatrical releases in to my schedule: "Black Panther" (already seen, review coming next week), "Avengers: Infinity War", "Solo: A Star Wars Story" and "Deadpool 2". I also just figured out a way to get "Ready Player One" into the mix, so I may go see that in a couple of weeks, since they moved the release of "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" to Feb. 2018. I was going to link via Tye Sheridan from that X-Men film to "Ready Player One", but the film also shares an actor with "Deadpool 2", so there you go.
AFTER: There's just no way for me to talk about what's wrong with this movie without giving away the central conceit, which looks like it was meant to be a sort of twist, but it's a really bad idea for a twist. Anyway, there may be spoilers ahead, so if you haven't seen "Rendition" or are planning to see it, feel free to stop reading now.
Once again, we're presented with a non-linear narrative structure. Much like "Vantage Point", this film shows a public event, a suicide bombing here, from different points of view, and to do that they have to muck around a bit with the timeline. This is also similar to the structure of HBO's "Westworld", in that there are two separate timelines that are shown as if they are parallel, only they're really not, and that's the twist. One timeline here shows the events that take place before the bombing, which involves one set of characters, and the other timeline shows the events after the bombing, which involves a different set of characters. The problem is, two characters are present in both timelines, and that's where things get confusing - we're not sure where, or rather when, those characters are in the timeline each time we see them.
Which is a shame, because clearly this was done to muddy the waters, especially concering the man who is accused of, well, not the bombing, but for something connected to the bombing, and in fact this is quite unclear, it involves him getting a phone call from someone named Rashid, and then he's tortured - sorry, waterboarded - sorry, again, "subject to extraordinary rendition" - until he reveals information about this phone call, who he talked to and what was said, possibly related to this bombing.
I get where they were going with this, it's obviously impossible for anyone, even an expert in torture - sorry, interrogation - sorry again, advanced questioning techniques - to tell the difference between a man who's very, very good at not telling the truth while being coerced from someone who just doesn't know anything in the first place. So like the interrogators, we the audience are not supposed to be able to tell whether the detained man is innocent or guilty. When he finally cracks under pressure, is the confession for real, or is he just saying anything he can at that point to stop the interrogation? Apparently the CIA learned absolutely nothing from studying the Spanish Inquisition.
We can get a clue, however, about this man's guilt or innocence by learning that this film was based on a true story, that of Khalid el-Masri, who was mistaken for a man with a very similar name, Khalid al-Masri. I could almost justify a story about an American man of Egyptian descent who's taken in to custody because his name is one letter off from the name of a terrorist. But a) that's just the inspiration for this film, and it is NOT the story that's being told here because b) that would leave the audience with much less doubt about the man's innocence, so that was removed, to maintain the dramatic tension.
The man incarcerated here is named Anwar El-Ibrahimi, and the man who eventually is responsible for the bombing is named Khalid, and that's not even close. The man who supposedly called Anwar is named Rashid, and that's just not close enough to Khalid either to explain the possible confusion. And then, like I said, this split-timeline thing is revealed near the end, and that calls everything into question.
NITPICK POINT: While the real El-Masri was transferred back to Afghanistan once he was detained, this doesn't seem like a typical procedure, for the CIA to bring a suspect back to a war zone. Wouldn't it make more sense to bring him to an internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, hold him without any formal charges being filed, and interrogate him there as needed? Because we all know now that's what went down in the years after 9/11, right?
NITPICK POINT #2: And I see this one in a ton of movies, it seems that directors never understand (or choose to ignore) this little thing called time zones. When a character in the Middle East, or South Africa, is talking on the phone with someone in the U.S., if it's daytime over there, it's probably the middle of the night here, and vice versa. You can't just make it daylight in both places at the same time just because that's convenient for your storytelling.
Also starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Reese Witherspoon (last heard in "Sing"), Omar Metwally (last heard in "Non-Stop"), Alan Arkin (last seen in "Going in Style"), Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Lovelace"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Accountant"), Aramis Knight (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Rosie Malek-Yonan, Zineb Oukach, Igal Naor (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Bob Gunton (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Hadar Ratzon Rotem, Reymonde Amsallem, Simon Abkarian, Wendy Phillips, Christian Martin
RATING: 3 out of 10 in-flight purchases
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