Can you hear me now?
Gooood, and that is all I can say about Body of Lies, it was good, a solid Goober flick, but lacking in a lot of places. A lot of the film is spent with characters Ed Hoffman (Russel Crowe) and Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) on cell-phones, with service, ironically enough. Ridley Scott assumes the audience knows his characters, and as we all know assumption is the mother of all fuckups. The lanes of fire were in all the right places, but we never really learn anything solid about our “heroes”. Scott chooses to tell his character’s story in a contextual manner, and when we meet them, they are already in the dirt, which I don’t mind, but the exposition never comes. How are we supposed to know whom to root for? And with all these Hollywood flicks, the evil, big-brother government is showcased as only Hollywood can.
So, in a world of lies, who do you trust and who do you care about in Body of Lies? Everyone is a pawn, and as Ed Hoffman likes to say at least three times that I counted in the film, no one is innocent in this business. Yet, I kinda got the feeling we were supposed to think, no, Ed, you are wrong, there are innocents and the evil, twisted maleficent CIA just fucks them over for shits and giggles. Come on, aren’t we all sick of this theme? And then when Hollywood tells the real story of the CIA via Good Shepherd, it is so boring and poorly edited that people actually walked out of the theater half-way through.
Like most things in life, the truth lies in the middle, but we are never introduced to the middle even once in Body of Lies. The CIA appears to be three guys, on cell-phones, with a little help from some Military Intelligence units stashed miles away in some Intel shack.
There was one really interesting story-line in the film and I don’t know if author David Ignatius meant to pay homage to The Man With One Red Shoe, but he did. In the 80s comedy, an unwitting average guy is marked as a spy to throw off another faction in, again, the evil, twisted, blah blah blah CIA. Anyway, that was a farce, but Body of Lies reveals the sinister consequences of playing games with people’s lives – to no useful end that I could glean.
There is a love story that starts and goes nowhere, it was cutesy and seemed out of place, not to mention, a field officer that would expose himself to such nonsense (in the middle of a war) isn’t very effective when the shit hits the fan – worse, in typical Hollywood fashion the bad guys use her as bait.
For me, when I see a movie is coming out about the CIA, and when they try to portray the company in a real-world light, I immediately crank up my expectations – and am usually let down. This movie had a lot of good individual bone fragments with intense action sequences, but it lacked the ligament to make it a great film. Ridley Scott is typically an amazing storyteller, and I also go into his films with higher expectations, so I humbly have to say, sorry Sir Scott, but you did an average job on this one.
