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Could do better

Deborah Ross

Wednesday, 19th November 2008

Body of Lies
15, Nationwide

Body of Lies is the latest film from producer/director Ridley Scott and it is an espionage thriller set mostly in the Middle East — Iraq, Jordan and Syria — featuring espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and, if you can keep up, which I didn’t, there is probably a considerable amount of counter-counter-counter-espionage in there too. In short, it is unlikely that you’ll come out of the cinema saying, ‘Well, that was a little light on the espionage, wasn’t it, dear?’ It’s one of those films where, part of the way through, you even start to think, do I actually care enough to follow all this? Is it even possible to follow this? (It is vexingly complex.) Or shall I drift and think of something else? Perhaps it’s just because I failed espionage at school — ‘could do better, and when is she going to get that false moustache?’ my reports always said — that I couldn’t get into it; found it such a dramatically uninvolving, uphill slog. On the other hand, it may be that it’s just not a very good film.

The thing is, this is a film that wants to be one thing, wants to say, as it literally does at one point, that ‘none of us is innocent’, and that the human cost of this war on terror is appalling all round, but then proceeds to trip up on every action movie conceit in the book: explosions every five minutes, car chases every ten minutes, someone getting their head blown off every quarter of an hour or so and, fighting his way though it all, a dishy, macho, white, morally righteous, swaggering hero who is up against it but always just gets away in time. Phew! Close shave, that one. It’s James Bond via today’s headlines, which should, I suppose, at least make it feel very now, but it doesn’t. There is nothing in this you haven’t seen before, and oodles that you have.

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