Traitor

• Last Updated: October 19. 2009 4:54PM UAE / October 19. 2009 12:54PM GMT

• Rating:

Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Starring: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce

The Fugitive meets Team America in this silly but entertaining thriller, in which the FBI agent Roy Clayton’s (Guy Pearce) chases the former special operations officer Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) – a Sudanese-American Muslim who appears to be implicated in a series of terrorist acts – across Europe, the Middle East and America. In spite of Cheadle’s always excellent acting and integrity, as well as an excellent performance from the French-Moroccan actor Saïd Taghmaoui, the film’s attempts to smash the Hollywood stereotypes about Islam and terrorism are well-intentioned but clunky, and the dialogue is heavy-handed and loaded with facts: “There are 1.2 billion Muslims in this world. Only 20 per cent of them are Arabs.” The scenes at the headquarters of a terrorist cell in Yemen (complete with sinister percussion and Arabic flute) and those at the prison are beautifully shot but come straight from the Hollywood handbook of cliche. While the Arabic dialogue prevails and is not subtitled, the protagonists conveniently use English as the language for all significant transactions – especially when it comes to the big cheeses such as the dastardly English-public-school-educated, designer-clothes-wearing Fareed Mansour (Alyy Khan). Yet if you can suspend any irritation at the sometimes lecturing tone and simplistic character renderings, Traitor makes a suspenseful film with plenty of twists, turns and shocks to keep things tense.