Rendition: Movie Review, DVD Review (2008)

Based on its cast alone, you’d swear Gavin Hood's thriller would be involving, but since he doesn't use Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Alan Arkin and Peter Sarsgaard to full effect, it only occasionally is.

Hood's heart is in the script, which uses a gimmick that toys with the plot's structure in ways that tamper with time.

In the movie, Witherspoon's Isabella becomes terrified when her husband, Anwar (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-born engineer, goes missing.

When she tries to learn what we know up front--at Dulles International Airport, Anwar is singled out as the chief suspect in a North African bombing and stolen away to be grilled and tortured--the movie begins its long string of complexities, with an evil Streep and others tying enough knots to make for one bumpy, heavy-handed ride.

This is a movie that wants to see so many sides of a complex situation--specifically, the state of the world post 9/11--that it becomes a prism, though one in which light and color aren’t sufficiently intricate or, for that matter, accurately muted.

Rated R. Grade: C+

View the trailer below: