Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ridley Scott Does It Again..., October 11, 2008
You really have to admire Ridley Scott's moxie.
Even though the 70-year-old director has long established himself as one of Hollywood's best and most durable directors; having helmed some of the most entertaining films of all time, in virtually every genre (including sci-fi classics like Alien and Blade Runner); and having been nominated no less than three times for the Best Director Oscar (Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down), to decide to take on theme that has produced exactly zero blockbusters thus far - the Middle East and terrorism - takes an incredible amount of chutzpah.
But it does help if you have the help of two of the biggest actors in Hollywood at the moment, those being Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe (who has worked with Scott on two previous films, Gladiator and A Good Year). It's ironic to think that the last time these two actors shared the screen was back in 1995, with the clichéd-but-entertaining oater The Quick and the Dead. Of course, at the time, Crowe was a complete unknown and DiCaprio was a 21-year-old newcomer with only a couple of notable titles under his belt. But oh, how that's all changed now.
It's not easy to describe the plot of Body of Lies without giving too much away. DiCaprio plays CIA operative Roger Ferris, who is trying to flush out a terrorist leader named Al-Saleem in Jordan. He gets his orders from Ed Hoffman (Crowe), a man for whom results are the only satisfactory outcome, delivered with a fair amount of arrogance and a cocky Southern drawl. Ed plays the situation like a kid playing a video game, and has the resources to change the rules anytime he feels like it, dispensing his orders from his office, from his backyard, from his daughter's soccer game, for Pete's sake! This, of course, infuriates Ferris to no end, because he is the one who is in the trenches, chasing the bad guys, dodging bullets, ducking explosions, and procuring the badly-needed intelligence that Hoffman needs. Ferris is also trying to build a productive working relationship with the head of Jordanian Intelligence, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong), a relationship that is made even more tenuous by Hoffman's double-dealings and hidden agendas.
There are so many ways that Scott could have screwed this up. A lesser director might have chosen to ramp up the action, sacrificing intelligence for entertainment. A lesser director could have taken this story of espionage and twisted it into a convoluted and indecipherable Gordian knot. A lesser director would have gotten less convincing performances from his lead actors.
But Ridley Scott is not a lesser director. Though the plot is indeed complex, with many layers and sub-layers, deceit and treachery, Scott never lets you lose sight of the overall picture. He tells a solid, wonderfully entertaining story, without the need to drive home its message with sledgehammer subtlety (after all, very few things are black and white). And most of all, he gets electric performances from Crowe and DiCaprio, whose symbiotic relationship with a thinly-veiled veneer of mutual contempt is a pleasure to watch.
I don't know if Body of Lies will end up breaking through the barrier that every movie in this genre couldn't; but for what it's worth, I hope it does. One thing's for sure... if anybody can, Ridley Scott can.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, Provocative DiCaprio/Crowe/Scott Thriller, October 10, 2008
"Body of Lies" is a taut, riveting thriller that weaves a tale of terrorism, espionage, and betrayal amid the current landscape of violence and retribution in the Middle East. The film is based on the novel by David Ignatius.
Leonardo DiCaprio continues to prove that he's got the acting chops and is believable in action films. Here he plays Roger Ferris, a CIA operative working to track down a bin Ladenesque terrorist named Al-Saleem. Al-Saleem's trail leads Ferris to Jordan, where he must balance working with and between his CIA handler (played with relish by an overweight, aged Russell Crowe) and the head of Jordanian intelligence (brilliantly played by Mark Strong), who are working at crosspurposes with each other. Ferris further complicates his mission by falling for an Iranian nurse (played by Golshifteh Farahani).
The movie uses wild technology, lies and counterlies, torture, and Ferris' growing disdain with the intelligence community. Some of the movie seems quite fanciful, and maybe it is, but except for a couple of places, it holds up as a brutually honest thriller.
"Body of Lies" isn't perfect, but it doesn't have to be. It's fiction. Some may find it unbelievable, but it's a movie, and that means it doesn't have to get everything right. It just has to entertain, and it certainly does.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Smart Spy Thriller That Is Utterly Current, October 16, 2008
Munich, then Syriana, and now Body of Lies. All smart, smart, smart spy thrillers, and all current. David Ignatius is a columnist for the Washington Post on international affairs. On the side, he is one of the best writers of spy fiction writing currently: he is, on a par with Robert Littell and Charles McCarry and, at most, a half step behind John Le Carre. Lies unfolds in the modern Middle East, Iraq and then Jordan, with sidesteps to Turkey and Dubai. (In the first scene in Dubai, one of our favorite buildings in Dubai was in the background, the Hotel Dusit.) Di Caprio plays a young CIA field agent. Crowe is his aging fat-around-the-middle handler and superior back in Washington, a man who cannot stop double-dealing, even with his own agents. Their objective is to entrap the head of an effective and up till then subterranean terrorist agency. If they cut off the head of the movement, they hope, the body will die. The movie plays out in a cascade of episodes, many of them grisly and all effective. Shot alternately in closeup (handheld cameras) and long shot (the view from overhead spy planes), they show the viewer how difficult it is to operate in an alien terrain where the enemies don't play by the rules. (The terrorists don't use cell phones or email so there's nothing to track.) In desperation, Di Caprio sets up a sting operation: he creates a false backtrail that insinuates that there is a second jihadist group out there drawing attention away from the master terrorist that Di Caprio and Crowe seek to capture. Di Caprio's sting leads to the death of an innocent and to Di Caprio's capture and torture - it's rough stuff, all of it, but it has the smell of truth to it. The movie is effectively filmed and efficiently plotted; the acting is always adequate and often much more than that. Russell Crowe is excellent (what a good actor he is!), Di Caprio is adequate to good, and Mark Strong as Hami, the head of Jordanian counter-intelligence, is absolutely superb. Body is really good.
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