Cheadle's terror thriller 'Traitor' is scary good
Joe Neumaier, Daily News
Tuesday, August 26th 2008, 7:16 PM
The twisty, turny "Traitor" - dumped for some reason at the end of August, when it ought to have had a dignified fall release - succeeds where similarly topical thrillers often fail because, like its protagonist, it plays its cards close to the vest. The duplicity at the core of the story extends to the movie's central conceit: that subjugating oneself to any cause has a cost that multiplies when least expected.
Don Cheadle is Samir, an African national and former U.S. special operations officer who spent his boyhood in Chicago. Now a wily Muslim jihadist, Samir and his team recruit young Muslim men for a holy war against the West.
A series of attacks leads the FBI's Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) to Samir just as a major round of assaults on the U.S. approaches its final planning stages. But Samir is not what he seems to be - is not even what he seems NOT to be - and being in Clayton's crosshairs forces several international tripwires to go off that neither side had planned on.
"Traitor" avoids the heavy-handedness that movies like this now regularly feature. Its story, from an idea credited to comic-author Steve Martin and co-written by director Jeffrey Nachmanoff - moves like the tautest of spy thrillers while detailing Samir's serpentine conscience.
More:
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2008/08/26/2008-08-26_cheadles_terror_thriller_traitor_is_scar.html"subjugating oneself to any cause has a cost that multiplies when least expected."
That's a good sentence, there. Sounds like a truism, to me.
Steve Martin, the wild and crazy guy himself, came up with the idea.
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