Don Cheadle loves his political activism. How else do you account for his starring role in "Traitor," a movie which sounds like a good idea on paper, but becomes too muddled with characters and story to be truly effective? To be sure, the feature isn´t something he should have run from. Rather, it is an important production (much like 2006´s criminally overlooked "Catch a Fire") which refuses to paint a quick and easy portrait of what it means to be a terrorist, opting instead to question the conventional wisdom as well as the audience´s own perceptions. It´s the second part "Traitor" has issues with.
Samir (Cheadle) witnesses his father being blown up in Sudan as a young boy. Years later, he is captured delivering explosive material to a known terrorist and jailed. It is there he makes a name for himself, so much so that when the inevitable prison break happens, he is included in the escapees. As Samir bounces from country to country-and continent to continent-two FBI agents are hot on his tail, intent on stopping a new attack. But in this game of chess, how do you tell the good guy from the bad guy?
Fully half of "Traitor" is a riveting experience. Had the screenplay (by director Jeffrey Nachmanoff from a story he and Steve Martin came up with) omitted FBI agents Clayton and Archer and refocused that screen time on Samir, I have no doubt we´d be talking Oscar in relation to "Traitor." Because the action crosscuts between the terrorists and agents for a majority of the production-eventually culminating in a ho-hum action sequence-the script fails to achieve a proper flow.
It´s not a sin for any movie to try and give the audience something they haven´t seen before. Rather, to fail spectacularly in an experiment is preferable to not trying something different. Let´s be clear: "Traitor" does not fail. Far from it, actually. It tries to weave a complex tale of espionage and deceit, trust and loyalty, across borders. We´re supposed to understand why it is people become so-called terrorists. And how loyalties are flipped in the blink of an eye. Keeping up with the FBI plotlines becomes a bore halfway through the film. Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough do nothing remarkable to make their characters memorable or even pleasant to watch.
Why is it we don´t care about them? Because Samir is always in the back of our minds, easily the most compelling character in the entire film. This is his story, not theirs. I couldn´t care less if Clayton and Archer question everyone in the free world. The focus needs to be on Samir. Let us delve even deeper in his psyche. The who´s and why´s and how´s of helping blow people up. The scars seeing his father die as a boy left on him. The internal conflict at being forced to kill innocent people. Those are the story beats the script is lacking.
There´s something not quite tangible about "Traitor," a quality I latched onto early. I think it is the relationship between Samir and terrorist middleman Omar (Said Taghmaoui). Initially based on distrust, the two men find themselves trusting each other in every way. Their relationship forms before our eyes, lending credence to the second half of the production, particularly the ending. This is the kind of gradual building the script proper needed to gain traction.
And that is the half of the film which works like gangbusters. Any time Cheadle commands the screen, regardless of material, it is impossible not to be amazed at the man. He never allows himself to be too low or too high; Samir´s internal conflict is mostly seen through his eyes. Wide and expressive, the minimalist Cheadle even lends credibility to the absurd sub-plot he shares with Jeff Daniels. He commands the screen in a way the material demands, bringing sympathy to an inherently unsympathetic "profession."
Still, I can´t get away from the inherent problems in the narrative structure. The script bobs and weaves like a basketball player on the way to a lay up with no real endpoint in sight. With the myriad plot points bandied about, I half expected Keifer Sutherland to jump out of a car at some point. Nachmanoff has stuffed the film with so many potential paths, he can´t service any of them adequately, leading to disappointment. "Traitor" could have been a great film. As is, it´s mediocre. The material deserves better.
Writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff is also responsible for "The Day After Tomorrow," the 2004 disaster flick maligned by critics and audiences alike. "Traitor" is an obvious step up from that, well, disaster; at least it, though, managed to fulfill all its story lines. The presence of Cheadle, Pearce and McDonough isn´t enough to elevate the film (particularly McDonough, who has next to nothing to do here). A 5 out of 10.