Body Of Lies, much like Don Cheadle’s Traitor, relies on the performance of its stars to elevate it above your run-of-the-mill thriller.  It’s slickly made (it’s directed by Ridley Scott, after all) but not much happens.  Satellite images are shown, intel is discussed, people run, things blow up but nothing really draws you into the story.  Russell Crowe plays Ed Hoffman, a CIA operative stationed safely in the states.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, the pawn that Hoffman moves across the chess board of the Middle East.  Hoffman makes cold-hearted, end-justifies-the-means decisions from stateside domesticity while Ferris deals with the psychological ramifications of executing (both figuratively and literally) these pronouncements.   Much humor is drawn from the incongruent nature of watching Hoffman perform household chores or care for his children whilst issuing life and death edicts on his cell phone with a casual demeanor usually reserved for ordering take-out.

Why does Hollywood persist in making these kinds of movies?  They’ve clearly forgotten how to make war movies.  Making a war movie during a time of war is always a difficult task.  It was easy during World War II because the sides were so clearly drawn.  Granted, most of these movies were outright propaganda but we were so clearly on the side of right.  Plus, we didn’t concern ourselves with pesky things like racial sensitivity.  If you were an Axis country, we had no problem reducing you to an ethnic stereotype.  It can make for some cringe inducing cinematic moments 60 years on.  But it also spared us a lot of subplots where filmmakers felt required to go out of their way to show a “good” Japanese, Italian or German person like we would get today.

There weren’t near as many movies made about the Korean War.  America was much more ambivalent about that one.  And Vietnam?  Hollywood made a grand total of one film about the Vietnam War during the Vietnam War.  And it took John Wayne to make that happen with his vehemently pro-American The Green Berets.  Obviously there were plenty of movies made post-Vietnam War.  Most of them were anti-war and all of them were anti-that-war.  It seems as if Hollywood, for all of its action movie expertise, has completely forgotten how to make a good war movie.  If people aren’t fighting aliens or robots (or alien robots…now that’s a movie I’d pay to see) then they really don’t know how to handle war movies anymore.  We’ve become paralyzed by our own knowledge of psychology.  All the action and intrigue gets replaced with existential angst.  That, in a nutshell, is the problem with Body Of Lies.

The acting is fine.  DiCaprio and Crowe turn in solid performances, as always.  But having the movie focus on DiCaprio’s character was ultimately a mistake.  For me, the movie was at its most interesting when Crowe was on screen.  There was a fascinating disconnect between his home life and his work life.  He was ruthless and had no qualms ordering someone’s death in order to preserve the mission.  He didn’t seem like a true “bad guy” but he was just this side of amoral. 

It’s all intrigue and espionage but we’re not really sure we’re supposed to be rooting for anyone.  Sure, Ferris is hunting a major terrorist, but the movie seems fairly ambivalent about our presence in the region.  This ambivalence makes it difficult to be emotionally invested in the film.  Regardless of your opinion of the war, it’s difficult to create tension when you’re not sure the heroes should even be there in the first place.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being 24 and 1 being The Specialist, Body Of Lies gets a 6.