RENDITION **½

If you're looking for a "fair and balanced" film about this subject, this is not the movie to see. Directed by Gavin Hood it stars Omar Metwally, Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Alan Arkin, Peter Saarsgard, and Meryl Streep.

Metwally is an Egyptian born engineer with an American wife he met in University, Witherspoon. They have a son and another child on the way at the beginning. He's taken from an American airport and sent back to the Middle East to be tortured and questioned at the instruction of Streep, who's head of the agency in charge of such activity, because of some cell phone calls it appears he received. His name is removed from the plane manifest and his wife is told he never got on the plane. She contacts Saarsgard, a college friend who also knew her husband, who is an aide to a Senator, Arkin, in an attempt to get some help in getting him back. Gyllenhaal is an American agent in charge of watching the interrogation. There's another whole subplot in the film concerning the interrogator and his family, but since it really has nothing to do with the main story (except to add an extra forty-five minutes), I'll leave it out.

Personally, I'm opposed to rendition, and so is this film. But, it's so obviously one sided in its approach it takes most of the tension from the plot. The film would have been a lot more effective had the rendition not been such an obvious and unnecessary error. Compound that problem with the fact that Gyllenhaal appears virtually catatonic during the first hour, and you have a picture that never really takes off. Streep's character is obviously not concerned with Constitutional guarantees and Arkin doesn't want to do anything politically inexpedient, so we're left with some histrionics from Witherspoon and a storyline ending that doesn't really seem realistic. The production values and acting are fine, but there's just not much of a plot to work with.