Situation: FBI Agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) tracks terrorist group Nathir to a police raid in Yemen and finds Sudanese-American Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) in the midst of it all. Clayton and his partner (Neal McDonough) can't get Samir to talk, and eventually Samir escapes with his new terrorist pal Omar (Saïd Taghmaoui) and becomes the group's demolition expert. As the FBI closes in, Samir reaches out to Carter (Jeff Daniels), his boss at another intelligence agency.This movie would have packed one hell of a narrative punch if we didn't all know from every single advert we've seen that Samir was secretly in league with Carter. Almost nothing from the first act made it into any ads, which is too bad as it is pretty good. We can see that Samir is caring and compassionate, and Cheadle, in an intense and dedicated performance, rises above to make that powerful when put into action.
It's also nice to see Pearce out and about again, making character choices about how far to push his Southern accent and when. He does officious so very well. Combined with Hey! It's that Guy (tm Fametracker) in uniform McDonough, they make a rote good cop-bad cop pair seem like fun. When you add in the criminally underused Daniels (seriously, the man operates at a Jeff Bridges level. Someone needs to write him a Dude to call his own), it's an attractive package for audiences.
Everything that surrounds them is fairly run of the mill. Writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff doesn't put a lot of personal style into the direction, narrative, or dialogue, and the devout-Muslims-aren't-necessarily-terrorists "twist" doesn't feel as fresh it could. But he's got Cheadle, fantastic location porn, and an absolutely stunning lighting scheme (the last two courtesy of J. Michael Muro, no doubt). Seriously, it's beautiful, and it adds meaning to every shot. Well done. B
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