听 User Rating 
Contains strong violence, language and scenes of torture.
Hollywood wades into the torture debate in Rendition, a hand-wringing drama about the illegal kidnapping and detention of terror suspects by the CIA. Reese Witherpsoon stars as Isabella El-Irahimi, the Chicago wife of Egyptian-American Anwar (Omar Metwally) who's snatched from the US by spooks in balaclavas and flown out to Marrakech to be tortured. Helmer Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) artfully weaves three narrative strands together, then yanks the movie's political teeth out one-by-one in a faint-hearted attempt to avoid, like, actually offending anyone...
After a suicide bombing in North Africa, CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is shoe-horned into a field operative role, overseeing the torture of Anwar by Morroccan interrogator Abasi Fawal (Igal Naor, suitably overbearing); meanwhile, Fawal's daughter (Zineb Oukach) gets mixed up with jihadis and, back in Washington, Anwar's pregnant wife (Witherspoon, with a spacehopper up her jumper) petitions her senator and gets a frosty reception from the CIA's unofficial head of torture (Meryll Streep, in ice queen mode).
"AS CHALLENGING AS A GCSE IN GENERAL STUDIES"
Given the controversial nature of the subject it deals with, Rendition is a surprisingly bland issue movie. Gyllenhaal's CIA man suffers the movie's crisis of conscience in clich茅s (he drinks, he smokes a hookah - he must be troubled), while Washington types debate ethics in tabloid-friendly terms ("If you never want to compromise join Amnesty International"). The basement torture scenes are less shocking than they should be - think Hostel the PG-rated cut. Worst of all, any point about "extraordinary rendition" gets lost when Hood detonates a narrative bomb of his own, pulling off a spectacular timeshift that'll make your head spin. It's a weapon of mass distraction, designed to stop you realising this is about as challenging as a GCSE in General Studies: Anwar may or may not be a terrorist; kidnapping people and flying them halfway around the world to torture them may or may not be a bad thing. Discuss.
Rendition is out in the UK on 19th October 2007.
The film is...well, just okay.
