Body of Lies
I saw a movie yesterday. It was called Body of Lies.
There’s dicaprio, a rugged up and comer in the terrorist fighten’ biz, who kicks a lot of asses and finds out about some more asses that need kicking. russell crowe is around, kinda. he watches dicaprio on tv via airboat-camera pretty much all hours of the day except when is sleeping, when he talks to leo on his phone (no bluetooth, n00b!!), and when he is with his kids, but he hates being with them so he continues to talk to leo. I’m pretty sure they set this child thing up for the sequel, cuz the loathing in his neglected daughter’s eyes was much akin to that in a jihadists’.At any rate, you can’t blame ol’ maximus bc if you could talk to leo all day, wouldn’t you?
BoL did a good job of showing how difficult ground conflict is in the middle east, constantly trying to convince the people that you are their friend, while filtering through them in order to arrest/kill/execute the enemy lying within. The settings were quality. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in that mess over there, so I don’t want to harp on anything in that regard.
Most of the things that annoyed me were petty, but I’m a petty guy.
Female lead (whose name was…). Sometimes hollywood, there just isn’t a place for a love story. I know, it sucks. Gotta get your female lead in there somewhere tho, f’n aclu. You could’ve put her back in the US, had her be a boss at the CIA, but no, you got greedy and put her in Jordan. This guy is mr. super spy, but one shoddy divorce, awkwardly forced into our frame of reference btw, has him pining for love in the desert.
Instead of either
a) a semi-platonic fancy that remains confined to the clinic where they meet, and would be easy to write off or
b) a one time sexual fling (the spy special),
James Bond Jr.( remember the show? i had the car. spikey wheels!) decides he’s going to court her, all proper, and gentlemanly like. The moment her beautiful face appeared on the screen all i could think was “hostage situation”. it was inevitable. The script played out more uniquely than i anticipated, but still, spies don’t get girlfriends!
The heist….Leo’s big plan to catch the terrorist leader is a devilish one. I thought it clever. However, something of that magnitude and importance would take years to build up, not just bc it would need temporal integrity but bc the scope was so mighty. They seemed to pull it off in a weekend. While leo did have the help of a dude with like, 50 computer monitors (nvidea 10^99 bro!!!), i still don’t buy it. (aside to Vigo: some good computer images, a little too windowish, nothing to worry about)
All in all, pretty good middle east movie. i think they need to stop making all of them except for documentaries. what’s going on is far crazier than anything a screenwriter can come up with, and it’s far too important to teach dumb americans with pop films and not facts.
6.5 icebergs/10
