Body of Lies (***½)

Directed By: Ridley Scott
Starring: Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio
Seen: November 7th 2008

***½ Out of ****

Body of Lies offers three extremely strong performances.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Roger Ferris, a CIA field-agent in Jordan, doing his best to find credible leads to eliminate terrorist threats and keep the world a safe place.

Russell Crowe is Ed Hoffman, Ferris’s handler back in Washington DC, who does not necessarily consider all the consequences in changing operations on the run or even running side operations which conflict with the main operation that is running at that specific point in time. Ferris then, finds it difficult to deal with Hoffman, and just as difficult to trust him, causing serious conflict between the two, and subsequently that spirals to more and more people as things progress.

Finally, Mark Strong is Hani, the leader of Jordanian intelligence whose only condition for working with Ferris is that he is never lied to in perhaps the strongest performance of the film. Requiring no lies from the CIA between Ferris and Hoffman when we know what Hoffman is like definitely complicates things to a spectacular degree…

Body of Lies never stays the same for long, it starts out with some spectacular action scenes, helicopter chases and bombings, and along the line switches over to pure spy-thriller, then again short romance, then strong drama, and even a quite extensive and brutal torture scene. The story is very complex, abut is presented in such a way that you can keep up with events and how they fit in with the bigger story quite easily.

Each of Scott’s films seem be filmed in a specific hue, Black Hawk Down overwhelmingly brown, Gladiator more of a beige colour, and Kingdom of Heaven more blue than anything. Body of Lies is given its own colour, and considering the varying levels of right and wrong, the grey hue is extremely fitting for the film.

Even though I truly enjoyed The Kingdom and many more middle-eastern conflict films, I consider Body of Lies to be the definitive middle-east conflict film, be sure to catch it whichever way you can.