Russell Crowe Movie:

				Label: Warner Bros. Salesrank:
		MPAA Rating: Media: Theatrical Release

Editorial Review:
Set it next to the similar Middle-East intrigue of Syriana, and Body of Lies is easy to follow--in fact, this movie's plot is amazingly straightforward for an espionage picture. Leonardo DiCaprio is the CIA agent on the ground, an Arabic-speaking chameleon who believes in forging personal relationships based on trust and professionalism. Russell Crowe is his supervisor, a meddler who makes up the rules as he goes along and is more than willing to trade long-term benefits for a short-term "win." (One of these characters is surely intended to represent the foreign policy style of the Bush administration in the first decade of the 21st century; take a guess which one.) While working on a case in Jordan, DiCaprio gets a modest flirtation going with a nurse (Golshifteh Farahani), although his most intense relationship is with a Jordanian intelligence chief (great role for Mark Strong) who takes a wary view of the CIA's activities. Ridley Scott directs as though weary of all the fuss, and his merriment in Crowe's breezy sociopath gives the movie a rather strange aftertaste. It gets the job done, although after it's over you might find yourself craving the head-scratching complications of Syriana. --Robert Horton

Body of Lies [Theatrical Release] Reviews:
The rot is in the house et the bomb under the bed
2008-12-07 - This film is a pamphlet and as such is an essential film in our consciousness of reality the way it may be in this globalized world. It shows how the West cannot win the war in which we have engage ourselves without even thinking it over twice. The war that must be stopped at once, and at once is already too late, that war against Islam, even if we pretend at times it is only against the Arabs because we don't want to know better, this war is lost, and was lost even before starting it, because it is not a war against terror at all , but a war against those who don't want to be westernized because we have been dumb enough to pretend that the American way of life was the future of the world, once again without even thinking it over twice. But what can we do in that situation? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The war is in fact between those in the Moslem world who want to move with history and benefit from the alleviating technology of the modern world on one hand, and the others in the Moslem world who do not want that alleviating effect because for them suffering and physical exhaustion and corporal punishments are the norm and have to go on for ever because they are the law of god. They can accept modern technology but only if it enables them to fight the world that has produced it. In fact the conflict is a conflict we have known before them when we were divided between those who wanted to go on with the good old faith that was telling us every single detail we were supposed to respect, accept and suffer in our daily life in the name of our own god and in the patient expectation of the coming redemption of our liberation by death. That was the struggle we had to fight for education against those who wanted to keep us uneducated. And it is the fight we are still fighting in our modern countries against those who do not see the necessity of restructuring our economy, our political system, our daily life and want to keep everything the way it has always been, ... well at least the way it has been for fifty years or so, maybe even less. They would certainly not torture anyone, except that they do sabotage the railroads and everyone would like to make us believe that it is not dangerous for anyone. Ask the students who would like to study for their future and who are blocked out of their classrooms by minorities who are numerous enough (most of the time a couple of dozens) to block the lifts that go up in the buildings and that blockade makes the security services stop all possible circulation in the buildings and on campus if necessary in the name of the risks people would run if they let them go through the blocking picket lines. The film is thus an absolute denunciation of the war on terror as being lost even before being fought, and as a means to make our own best patriots and soldiers regress to the level of pure animals, birds of prey, carnivorous saber tigers straight out of the jungle or Siberia, in one word regress back to the time of the crusades. And finally this film reveals to anyone who wants to know about it how the present surveillance based on the satellites over our heads enables the people behind the screens that receive their images to see details that are so small that they could not have a better view if they were just ten yards away. That mess was not created by Bush, of course not. He was just dumb enough to fall into the trap and Cheney was dumb enough to believe he could win that war, and John McCain knows how to win a war, like the one in Vietnam, or the one in Somalia, or the one in Afghanistan, or the one in Iraq, or ... what would the next one be if these warmongers had the power to start a new one? And imagine the mess Barack Obama has to clean up, because now the eggs have been broken the omelet must be cooked. Good luck if we do not want the whole kitchen to explode knowing there are tons of flame sensitive explosive hovering just one foot over the gas-burner.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


Russell & Ridley are involved? I'm there!
2008-12-06 - I didn't think of this movie as a political statement or a current news program, just as a good story with great actors. If I want to watch the news I will tune into CNN.

For me it is all about the story, photography and acting. BOL has it all. Ridley's ability to transport us to the location, Russell's ability to say so much without words, and Leo has been a pleasure to see develop into one of the best actor's of our time.

I give this movie the highest rating Amazon allows. It moved quickly enough to never be a bore and slowed down from time to time to allow the story to be apparent.



I really wanted to like this one...
2008-11-14 - These days, Ridley Scott's brand as a director is such that when you go to see a film of his, there tend to be certain expectations ranging from story to action to screenplay. When the trailer came out, i had very high expectations for this movie. I wouldn't say i was sorely disappointed but it was a bit of letdown.

'Body of Lies' stars Leo dicap as Roger Ferris, a CIA counter-terrorist agent based in Jordan. Russell Crowe as a manipulative and sometimes not entirely well meaning senior head at CIA who is Dicaprio's supervisor.

The movie has the trademark Ridley Scott touch to it, in terms of action, cinematography etc. But there are a lot of holes in the script that come of as a letdown. The sudden need of a love interest for Dicap's character is pretty out of place in the story and if you ask me, is not warranted in the least.

My highlights in the film would be Russel Crowe's character which is a complete diff from his usual persona and he seems to have added a few pounds for this role (similar to Stallone in Copland) , the other would be a solid performance by Mark Strong, who plays Hanni Salaam (pasha) head of Jordan's secret service and who plays a key role in Leo Dicap's character being based in Jordan and his work there.

The movie reinvents the same whole concept and dangerously gets into the stereotype of Arabs and the subsequent influence of terrorism from the middle east.

3 Stars. This movie would have been a classic had it a more cohesive and tight script.

absorbing political thriller
2008-11-10 - Less pedantic than "Lions for Lambs," but more pulpy than "Rendition" or "Stop-Loss," "Body of Lies" is Hollywood's latest endeavor to bring the war-on-terror to the silver screen.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays an undercover CIA operative working in the explosive Middle East under the guiding hand of Russell Crowe, his ruthless, acerbic boss who feeds him instructions straight from his cushy office at Langley Headquarters. Despite their double billing, DiCaprio and Crowe rarely appear on screen together, making DiCaprio the default star of the picture. He gives one of his finest performances as a man thoroughly dedicated to the cause he is fighting for but deeply cognizant of the fact that much of what he is required to do in the course of his job will wind up robbing him of a certain percentage of his humanity after all is said and done. Crowe as the cynical boss and, even more impressively, Mark Strong as a high official in the Jordanian government offer superlative support.

As directed by Ridley Scott (from a screenplay by William Monahan based on a novel by David Ignatius), "Body of Lies" benefits from engaging dialogue, exciting action sequences and razor-sharp editing. The movie is long (128 minutes) but rarely uninteresting, and DiCaprio makes us care deeply about his character.

It may not be the "deepest" of the war-on-terror movies, but it's certainly one of the most watchable.

Intense Political Thriller Takes More Cues from Hollywood than the Current Middle East Crisis
2008-11-08 - The craftsmanship behind director Ridley Scott's 2008 convulsive political thriller is impressive, but having acts of terrorism drive an intentionally labyrinth plot reveals how they impede the story structurally, an insurmountable barrier that screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) can't seem to overcome. The movie's first half is all the more bewildering for all the double-crosses and cover-ups that serve to set up the central situation. Based on Washington Post columnist David Ignatius' popular 2007 novel, the movie focuses on embedded CIA operative Roger Ferris who is on an undercover assignment to hunt an Al-Qaeda terrorist leader named Al-Saleem. Ferris is not entirely alone as he is connected via cell phone with his stateside boss Ed Hoffman, who is the head of the CIA's Near East division and directs Ferris toward life-threatening tasks in a most nonchalant manner from his upscale suburban home.

The plot's impetus is driven by the elusive Al-Saleem's unblinking series of suicide bombings in Europe in response to the invasion by US and UK troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The movie gets more interesting when Ferris decides to work with Jordanian intelligence director Hani Salaam, an erudite, enigmatic figure who is well entrenched in the Middle East militia and appears to take a page from Mario Puzo's The Godfather when it comes to loyalty and betrayal. Of course, it's a matter of course that Ferris' loyalty is tested when an elaborate plan is hatched to create a bogus competing terrorist group and use an unwitting Dubai architect as the head. The other complicating factor is that Ferris has fallen for pretty Iranian nurse Aisha when he gets treated for possible rabies at a clinic. It becomes inevitable that she also becomes a pawn in the political intrigue. Scott paints his canvas with a lot of graphic violence from large-scale bombings to more intimate acts of torture.

All of the external elements are fitting, but they can't seem to masquerade the convoluted and often cliché-ridden plot at the film's core. A solid cast goes a long way to compensate for the plot holes. As Ferris, Leonardo DiCaprio applies his trademark wiry energy to an intensely compelling performance that could have shown a bit more variety. Adding fifty belly-stretching pounds to his frame, Russell Crowe, Scott's favorite leading man (Gladiator, American Gangster, A Good Year), plays the Arkansan Hoffman as a scene-stealing character part. The irony is that the Australian actor's Southern accent is more convincing than DiCaprio's. Their antagonistic interplay, played out mostly on the phone, is rather predictably developed. Fetching Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani provides gratefully calm relief to the ongoing mayhem as Aisha, although her character comes across as a mere plot device. There is a nicely fractious dinner table scene with Ferris and her judgmental older sister, although the movie plays down the more human-size hostilities in favor of the pyrotechnics.

As Hani, Mark Strong (Sunshine, Stardust) leaves the most vivid impression of the cast but for the most old-fashioned of cinematic reasons - he plays what could be a villainous figure as a suave, mysterious man of honor who is completely on top of his job, an intentional counterpoint, at least physically, to Crowe's slovenly Hoffman. The film's resolution defies credibility, but it finally becomes clear that Monahan is not interested in exposing the factors that have driven the Middle East political maelstrom into acts of escalating terrorism. Rather, his screenplay shows that testosterone-driven Hollywood-style entertainment can take place anywhere.