ìBody of Lies,î the new Ridley Scott action thriller, is a classic example of a film trying to do too much. It has a lot of things going for it: a solid cast, some high-paced action, and a relevant story line, but ultimately it fails to live up to the sum of its parts.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Roger Ferris, a CIA operative charged with gathering intelligence on Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East. He relays this information back to Washington via Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a portly old Southern bulldog who Ferris stays in contact with mostly by phone.
Hoffmanís callousness is strikingly reinforced in the various places he finds himself on the phone with Ferris. In one scene, be essentially orders Ferris to send a man to his death while he is picking his children up from school.
Itís telling that the most memorable scenes of the movie are the phone calls, because the rest of the movie is pretty standard espionage-thriller fare: discover terrorist-leader-of-the-week, chase people, gunfight, clever plan, more chasing, rinse and repeat. The intent is to give the audience a glimpse into the world of counter-terrorist warfare, and if that were what this entire movie contained, it would succeed pretty well.
However, there is also a love story sub-plot between Ferris and a Jordanian nurse (Golshifteh Farahan) that seems to derail the movie every time it is visited and feels very tacked-on. We learn later that it is tacked on for a reason, but that only makes it seem more like the improbable artificial plot device it ultimately is.
In the end, thereís very little in this film we havenít seen many times before. It is attempting to be fresh and topical, but comes off instead as a stale action thriller with plot twists you can see coming 30 minutes before they happen.
If you go with low expectations, the film can be pretty entertaining. But I was expecting more from everyone involved. In a week where the main competition is a talking chihuahua, I suppose you can do a lot worse, but I had hoped Ridley Scott could have done a lot better.