Another year – another Ridley Scott film. Scott is responsible for some of my favourite ever films. They tend to be earlier films like Blade Runner and Alien than later ones, but American Gangster last year was superb, while 2006’s A Good Year (also starring Russell Crowe) was abysmal.
So where does Body of Lies fit? Well it’s not had wonderful reviews, and while it feels a little workmanlike at times, the story is interesting and it certainly feels contemporary. Crowe plays the Hoffman, a CIA director who runs Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ferris – an agent in the Middle East. When we first meet him he’s based in Iraq, but he moves on to places such as Jordian, Dubai and Syria at various points during the film.
Ferris is trying his best to nurture agents on the ground, but Hoffman, who inhabits a suburban Washington DC lifestyle and seems to permanently have a mobile headset wired to his ear, is in a rush to find the operator of an Al Qaeda cell currently causing misery in Sheffield, Manchester and Amsterdam.
The real intelligence of the piece turns out to be the Jordanian head of intelligence, Hani (Mark Strong), who’s men are everywhere and really understand the geopolitics of the region.
We continually see surveillance imagery taken by drones high in the sky, although the Al Qaeda operatives know how to stop the drones tracking them, with a clever desert manoeuvre.
Others have taken against the immorality of most of the film’s characters, including the otherwise likeable Ferris. But that’s not really a problem in a spy film. I suppose the bigger problem is the speed with which the conclusion of the film’s reached. It’s all a little too neat and tidy – but then a film has to have some kind of resolution.
So worthwhile? Undoubtedly. But like the Coen’s and Burn After Reading, it’s not as good as the film that came before it. I just hope that the next film Scott makes is The Forever War and not Monopoly The Movie.