Movie Review: Traitor

Traitor (2008) 

Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Written by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Starring Don Cheadle. Neal McDonough, Guy Pearce, Said Tagmaoui

Release Date August 27th, 2008

Published September 10th, 2008 

Traitor has a complicated premise that is difficult to describe without taking some of the suspense out of it. This may explain why Traitor arrived in theaters with little promotion and to confused and mostly indifferent potential audiences. Studio marketers simply could not turn the trick of enticing audiences without giving away the films most satisfying twists and turns. The marketing then comes down to star Don Cheadle and while he is a respected actor, the star of Talk To Me and Boogie Nights is still not a household name.

When Samir Horn (Cheadle) was a boy he watched his devout Muslim father killed in a car bombing. Taken from his home in Sudan to the United States by his mother, Samir was a brilliant student who joined the military, made special forces and then disappeared. After years off the grid from Chicago to various points in the middle east, Samir is captured in Yemen while building and selling bombs to a group of jihadists.

After befriending the terrorist leader Omar (Said Tagmaoui) Samir, is invited into the terrorists' inner circle and eventually is asked to take part in an major attack on US soil. On the heels of the terrorists are a pair of FBI agents, Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Max Archer (Neal McDonough), both of whom believe that Samir is the key to cracking the plot but for different reasons.

Directed and adapted for the screen by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Traitor is a smart suspense flick with the popcorn thrills necessary of good entertainment and the top notch performances of a high end drama. Though the plot grows convoluted as more and more of the story unfolds, Nachmanoff keeps audiences engaged by highlighting the performance of Don Cheadle who commands the screen with an actorly presence.

The cast of Traitor is the glue that holds it together. As the plot grows a little weedy near the end, Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce keep things in line with their incredibly engaging performances. Cheadle especially has a talent for getting an audience in rapt attention. See his performances in Boogie Nights and Hotel Rwanda, Cheadle is among the most fascinating and compelling actors working today. 

Pearce, though he has acted sparingly since his blistering debut in L.A Confidential, makes exceptional use of his weary eyes and measured monotone voice, tinged here with a slight southern accent, to give his words greater import. Scenes between Pearce and character actor extraordinaire Neal McDonough, crackle with energy even as the two are just laying plot groundwork.

Traitor is not without flaws, the terrorists are weak characters and some of the twists and turns don't pay off as well as they should. Nevertheless, Traitor hits enough of the right notes to be a compelling often exciting pop entertainment. Don Cheadle may never grow into a box office titan but his talent cannot be measured in box office dollars.

See Traitor for Cheadle and Pearce, performances worth the price of admission.

Movie Review The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) 

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Written by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Roland Emmerich

Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum

Release Date May 28th, 2004

Published May 27th, 2004 

Being a liberal Democrat and environmentalist, I am supposed to be excited that a major summer blockbuster is taking up a cause I care about.

I’m not.

I am not at all excited that a topic as important as global warming is getting the Hollywood treatment, especially from the director who brought us Godzilla. The Day After Tomorrow plays at being important in its marketing campaign only to cover up its utter goofiness as a movie.

Dennis Quaid stars as Jack Hall, everyman Paleoclimatologist with a thing for the end of humanity because of global warming. So into saving future generations from what he believes is a coming ice age, he has lost contact with his wife (Sela Ward) and his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Jack spends most of his time with his partners Frank (Jay O. Sanders) and Jason (Dash Mihok) traveling the polar ice caps. Their most recent excursion uncovered something dangerously unexpected that proves Jack’s theory about the ice age. Unfortunately, when Jack pitches his theory at a conference in New Delhi India, he is blown off by the Vice President of the United States (Kenneth Walsh). The VP is more concerned about American wallets than the survival of the human race.

Of course, Jack’s theory applies to an ice age in say 100 years from now, which may be why the VP is less than impressed. Nevertheless, something good comes out of it when Jack meets Dr. Terry Rapson who will play an important role when Jack’s theory comes true much sooner than he expected.

Jack’s theory is that melting polar ice caps will cause the jetstream to stop delivering warm air to much of the Northern Hemisphere, leaving it a frozen wasteland. We are tipped to some serious trouble when Japan is hit with bricks of hail, Los Angeles is devastated by multiple tornadoes and New York City turns into a swimming pool.

More bad news for Jack, his son Sam along with some schoolmates, Brian (Arjay Smith) and Laura (Emmy Rossum) are in New York and trapped by the rising waters in the top floor of the New York Public Library. Now Jack and his team must trek through the rapidly freezing countryside from Washington DC to New York to save his son. Meanwhile, his ex-wife must decide whether to stay with a dying child and wait for a rescue that might not come or join the hordes of Americans heading for the safety and warmth of Mexico.

The film has a solid three act structure, act one the storm, act two the survival and act three the rescue. Of course, director Roland Emmerich who also wrote the film’s script, can’t resist throwing in extraneous touches like a boneheaded sendup of the Bush administration that even the most ardent Bush haters will roll their eyes at. The dying child I mentioned before, exists only to give Sela Ward something to do and is resolved with little drama.

And then there are the wolves. Yes, for some reason wolves have escaped from the New York Zoo and attack our heroes at the most opportune time.

Now the thing that is garnering the most attention about this film is its tenuous grasp of global warming and environmental issues. To the film’s credit, there is no mention of saving the planet, Emmerich has at least grasped the idea that saving the environment is not about the planet, it’s about saving human beings. That said, his ridiculous ideas about global warming, polar ice caps and so-called SUPER storms are more fiction than science.

There may indeed be an ice age in the future but that is part of the cyclical nature of the planet. There has been an ice age before and there will be one again, whether we cause it or not. There is little evidence we could cause it and that is where the film’s specious logic goes beyond its dramatized idea of a six day ice age and into the dangerous situation of casting a negative light on real environmental issues.

The fact is that a summer blockbuster is no place for such big ideas. Summer blockbusters are to dazzle the eye with cheap thrills and loud noises, if they can also be entertaining on top of that, it’s truly an accomplishment. This portentous idea of a blockbuster with global concerns only serves to denigrate those concerns by dragging them down to the level of the big, dumb, loud blockbuster.

On top of all those problems is that the film is just dull as dirt. While some of the special effects are impressive, every bit of character including the usually reliable Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal are annoying, cloying caricatures of melodramatic TV drama characters. This is WB level drama, especially the group of misfits at the library.

The film is interminable halfway through, where the storm and the impressive effects are pretty well over. After that, the film’s atrocious dialogue must carry the day. At 2 hours plus, The Day After Tomorrow makes you wish it were really tomorrow and the movie was a distant memory.