Traitor

[Amazon Link]
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[3.0
stars] [IMDb Link]

An OK modern-day terrorism thriller.

Don Cheadle plays Samir Horn. When we first see him, it's as a child in Sudan, watching his daddy get blown up by a car bomb. We then immediately jump forward to modern-day Yemen, and he's negotiating with some bad guys to sell them some Semtex. Unfortunately for him and the bad guys, the Yemeni authorities swoop in, shooting up many terrorists (yay!) and carting the rest of them off to Yemeni jail.

That is, of course, not the end of it. Samir is suspected of betrayal by the bad guys, but (convincingly enough) he argues that he's in jail, and why would that be, if he's talking to the authorities? If you've seen enough of these movies, you know the probable answer: because he's staying undercover to catch even bigger fish. (Hope that's not a spoiler, but c'mon: did you think that the major star of the movie is going to play a terrorist?) As another complication, only one other person knows Samir is really undercover; everyone else on our side "knows" he's a terrorist.

What follows is globe-hopping cat-and-mousery between good guys and bad, well-acted and pretty suspenseful. To it's major credit, Traitor stays away from the whole lefty moral equivalence plague-on-both-houses Hollywood tropes: the bad guys are Muslims, and while one of them, Samir's best buddy, approaches three-dimensionality as a character, he's still unambiguously on the wrong side.

Interesting bit of trivia: Steve Martin gets credit for "story" and "executive producer" here. Yes, that Steve Martin.


Last Modified 2024-01-31 5:34 AM EDT