Philadelphia Weekly

Jake Gyllenhaal has got to be the luckiest kid in show biz. This mousy medium-talent keeps inexplicably landing plum roles in one high-profile picture after another, always adequate but never exceptional, so often eclipsed by his co-stars that Gyllenhaal seems to occupy the soft, mushy center of many movies I otherwise love unequivocally.

Just imagine if Brokeback Mountain had boasted a second lead that matched the fiery commitment of Heath Ledger's transcendent turn? Or if Zodiac had a protagonist who could actually hold his own against those barn-burning supporting performances from Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo. Again, Gyllenhaal isn't a bad actor. He's just kind of ... there.

About halfway through Rendition, I decided that maybe I've been wrong about Jake all along--maybe he really is terrible.

But then it dawned on me that since the most awful performance in the film is given by Meryl Streep, this is hardly a level playing field on which to judge anybody.

As you might've guessed from the title, director Gavin Hood's follow-up to his Oscar-winning Tsotsi is all about our nation's lovely practice of secretly transporting terror suspects to undisclosed foreign lands, where they're subject to far more innovative forms of questioning than the "quaint" old Geneva Conventions will allow within these particular borders, hamstrung as we are by a musty Constitution and something that still sort of resembles due process--at least for the time being.

Obviously this is an important subject, and indeed I found myself trapped in an infuriating post-screening conversation with a colleague who kept insisting this is a motion picture every American needs to see. I argued that the topic demands discussion, but the movie itself is actually really boring and kind of shitty. He claimed such things don't matter--so I guess you all have your marching orders.

Anyhow, Reese Witherspoon stomps around Washington, D.C., as a pregnant soccer mom, furious that her picture-perfect husband (Omar Metwally) has been whisked away from their catalog-friendly suburban life and shuttled off to a North African dungeon where he's now busy having his genitals electrocuted as Jake Gyllenhaal stands around next to him, drinking whiskey and pouting.

It seems Witherspoon's husband committed the terrible crime of being Egyptian, and after a brutal suicide bombing in this annoyingly unnamed North African country, Meryl Streep's conspicuously Southern-accented, purely evil CIA exec has randomly decided he's responsible. Terrific character actors such as J.K. Simmons furrow their brows, asking for evidence. Streep responds by speaking in red-state bumper-sticker slogans, ordering up some torture and then gnawing the heads off newborn babies. (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.)

Gyllenhaal is the agency rookie assigned to oversee Mr. Witherspoon's rendition, but he just keeps getting shitfaced all the time and having creepy and unsatisfying sex with a Middle Eastern co-worker, presumably because he feels bad. Grand inquisitor Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor) is throwing himself into this particular job with great gusto, as his teenage daughter (Zineb Oukach) recently ran away from home to shack up with a swarthy young jihadist, and there's no underestimating the toll that dull domestic melodrama can take on a torturer. Occasionally Witherspoon makes a weeping phone call or two from a D.C. hotel room, but mostly we're stuck watching Gyllenhaal stare into the middle distance and slur, while Metwally screams naked and in agony. Riveting stuff.

Besides the profound lack of drama and generally arrogant air of Oscar-grubbing self-righteousness, what Rendition suffers from most is an infuriating lack of specificity. Calling these folks one-dimensional would be extremely generous, as there are barely a handful of personality traits to go around in this picture. These characters have been given vague platforms instead of human behavior, and they wander stiffly through the frame, reciting talking-points memos in lieu of actual dialogue.

Kelley Shane's screenplay may as well have been written on index cards. Nothing here feels real, and for an allegedly muckracking expose, the film packs surprisingly little urgency.

Rendition eventually climaxes with an arbitrary time-bending plot twist, one of those post-Shyamalan "look at me" writing class exercises that's supposed to recontextualize everything you've been watching thus far, but really just underscores how little anything in the movie matters. What a waste.

Rendition
D+
Director: Gavin Hood
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep
Opens Fri., Oct. 19