Rendition
(PG-13)

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Jake Gyllenhaal as a burned-out CIA analyst

Here's a movie that appears to have plenty going for it. It has a strong cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin and Peter Sarsgaard. It's directed by Gavin Hood, whose Tsotsi won a Best Foreign Film Oscar. It boasts timely and troubling themes, such as the abuses of the so-called war on terror through such practices as our government's kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, secret prisons and covert, out-of-whack C.I.A. operations.

Isabella Fields El-Ibrahim (Reese Witherspoon) asks a senator's aide (Peter Sarsgaard) to find her abducted husband.

Despite all its urgent topicality and star power, Rendition emerges as a clumsy, plodding thriller that manipulates rather than illuminates and baffles rather than urges audiences to ask tough questions, let alone to be outraged. Reese Witherspoon plays Isabella, the pregnant wife of Anwar El-Ibrahim (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-born, American-educated man who, on his way back from a business trip in Africa and despite the flimsiest of evidence, becomes the target of state-sponsored abduction.

While burned-out C.I.A. analyst Douglas Freeman (a strangely disconnected Gyllenhaal) and a local cop (Igal Naor) torture the guy strapped nude to a chair with electrodes, fists and water-soaked hoods, Witherspoon tries to take on the government through an old boyfriend (Sarsgaard, one of the best things in the whole movie) who works as a senator's flunky. The multi-story movie never really congeals, so what was clearly meant to be a hard-hitting exposé of a contemporary outrage -- in the manner of, say, Syriana or Crash -- instead comes off as expository, obvious and plodding. A great subject is a terrible thing to waste.

Terrorism czar Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) and Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin)

by Stephen Rebello

credit: Sam Emerson/New Line Cinema