Body of Lies (2008)

User Review

• 

  Barneyonmovies

  8 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: You'd be forgiven for worrying that a Hollywood movie about the war on terror might try to glamorise or normalise America's tactics and involvement in Iraq. But happily, William Monahan and Ridley Scott's 'Body of Lies,' makes the CIA look like the carelessly ham-fisted, maliciously meddling organisation that they really are.
  
  The story echoes the hunt for Bin Laden, and follows a field operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he travels from Iraq to Libya and enlists the help of their head of intelligence (Mark Strong). All the while he's directed and undermined by his boss Ed Hoffman over the phone (Russell Crowe) who constantly sends other operatives in all guns blazing to undermine the covert operations and trust that he's building, then eventually the two come up with some hair-brained scheme to frame an innocent man as a terrorist in order to bring their man out of hiding.
  
  The racism and callousness with which Hoffman talks about the region and the tactics they employ do the job that any film of this kind should in demonstrating why such terrorists hate the West so much in the first place. Plus, the script cleverly ensures that the exasperation and desperation you feel as an audience member is matched by Ferris himself, as, when topped with flashbacks to torture sequences that he's witnessed, he's well and truly beaten by his experience, and in the end, he gets an interesting character arc where he finally sees the light.
  
  That means the film actually works on an emotional level, and that in turn gives it the license to work as a thriller with its constantly twisting plot, extremely fast pace, and tense set-pieces.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The script tries to engineer a relationship between Ferris and a Libyan woman, and though that does do something to connect Ferris to the people whose lives he's crashing into and endangering, it does feel extremely contrived, and her character gets no development at all.
  
  VERDICT: Through the eyes of a CIA agent, 'Body of Lies,' does a good job of realising how messed up the war on terror really was, and works well as an engaging thriller and character drama.

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