Intimate portrait of terror

Few films in the sub-genre dealing with the war on terror have performed well at the box office

Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce in a scene from Traitor

Traitor (M) 3½ stars National release TEN years from now, when a history of American films of the first decade of the 21st century is written, the sub-genre dealing with the war on terror will be analysed closely, as will the fact that not one of these sometimes estimable films, which include Rendition, Grace is Gone, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss and Body of Lies, have performed well at the box office.

Audiences don't seem to want to tackle post-9/11 stories, and there's no reason to think Kathryn Bigelow's upcoming The Hurt Locker or the present Traitor will fare any differently.

Traitor is one of the most interesting of the bunch. The original story was written by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) and was adapted for the screen by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, previously best known for co-scripting the apocalyptic The Day after Tomorrow. Nachmanoff directed it too, his first effort in this capacity, and he succeeds in bringing clarity to a complex story. Politically, it's even-handed: on the one hand the film suggests that a disturbingly large number of Muslims living in rural and middle America are sufficiently fanatical to become suicide bombers; they've been planted in their small communities, waiting for orders, biding their time. On the other hand, the film depicts American Muslims who are bitterly opposed to the fundamentalists.

For a long time Nachmanoff makes it deliberately difficult to decide where Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) stands. This is an obviously conflicted character who, as a child, saw his father assassinated by a car bomb in Sudan but who is now a US citizen. Yet he provides expert advice to Islamicists in Yemen, as a result of which he's thrown into prison. Here he meets Omar (Said Taghmaoui), a Swiss-educated fanatic with links to the head of a terrorist cell based somewhere in Europe, and when the pair manage to escape together Samir becomes a part of the jihadist cell that is planning bombings.

Because Samir is a US citizen, and was once in the military, the FBI is interested in him, and agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) sets out to track him down. Also tangentially involved is the mysterious Carter (Jeff Daniels), a CIA veteran. By this time the film has jet-setted from the Middle East to continental Europe, London, Canada and the US, but the alert viewer will know where the plot is heading. This predictability is the film's only serious flaw, though, and despite it Nachmanoff succeeds in creating considerable suspense, especially as the drama nears its climax.

Given the seriousness of the theme it's not surprising the performances are intense: Cheadle and Pearce bring a steeliness to their roles as hunted and hunter, and it's left to the supporting characters, notably Taghmaoui and Archie Panjabi (as a terrorist leader), to bring a disturbing charm to their fanatical characters. Some will see Traitor as just a thriller, and it works pretty well on that level. As an attempt to delve into the murky reaches of fundamentalism and fanaticism it displays its ambitions.