Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe

Director: Ridley Scott

“There's nothing to like in the Middle East,” mumbles Ed Hoffman, a CIA top-notch played by Crowe, trying to dissuade Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) from staying back in Amman. Of course, the shoe can be on the other foot. From that part of the world, there’s little to like in America. And Body of Lies, written by the screenwriter of The Departed and Kingdom of Heaven and adapted from a book of the same name by The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, is certainly not going to help the US cause.

Pitched as a terror/spy thriller — “Trust No One. Deceive Everyone.”— Body of Lies makes no bones about its politics. If the utter disgust for the war being waged in the name of jehad is supposed to be an inverse joke on how the Bush Administration is fighting it, or a view of the war on terror that is refreshingly politically incorrect, the message is lost. And that’s despite the trite use of W H Auden in the beginning: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”

As Hoffman and Ferris proceed to see it, though, there are absolutely no grounds for the evils being wrought in the name of God. A suicide bomber who has lost his nerve tells Ferris: “If they think you know too much, they say martyrdom.” Looking for “low-level al-Qaeda operatives” for a counter-operation, Ferris seeks: “Basically someone between Osama and Oprah.” Another faithful is dismissed as “so he touches his head to the ground four-five times a day”. All it takes for Ferris to smoke out (to use the famous expression) the dreaded terror head is cooking up a fictitious terror group of his own over the net.

... contd.