Rid­ley Scott’s fol­low up to the gen­tle com­edy of A Good Year (read The Dork Report review) and the crime drama Amer­i­can Gang­ster (partly mod­eled, I think, on Michael Mann’s epic Heat), returns to the politically-themed yet still action-oriented ter­ri­tory he first vis­ited in Black Hawk Down. The key dif­fer­ence here is that, like Peter Weir’s The King­dom and Pete Travis’ Van­tage Point (read The Dork Report review), Body of Lies is set in a fan­ta­sy­land safely divorced from the very, very real events that inspired Black Hawk Down. All of these films have the air of gritty real­ism, but still indulge in the wish ful­fill­ment of a very cin­e­matic war on terror.

Body of Lies can be seen as com­plet­ing a kind of Mid­dle East tril­ogy for Scott, after the afore­men­tioned Black Hawk Down plus the Cru­sades epic King­dom of Heaven (read The Dork Report review). Screen­writer William Mon­a­han wrote both King­dom of Heaven and Body of Lies (adapted from the novel by David Ignatius). But of the three, Body of Lies is clearly the least serious.

Mesopotamia, and step on it!

No doubt movie stu­dio exec­u­tives have cal­cu­lated down to the last cent that world audi­ences are still too sen­si­tive to actual ter­ror­ist attacks like Lon­don and Madrid in order to buy tick­ets for dra­matic recre­ations on the big screen. Instead, most main­stream terrorism-themed movies are basi­cally enter­tain­ments that only have the feel of seri­ous import, and none of the sub­stance. Body of Lies invents anal­o­gous ter­ror­ist attacks such as a sleeper cell blow­ing up their Lon­don flat, and later, the bomb­ing of a U.S. marine base in Turkey (I hope O’Neal — Demi Moore — from Scott’s G.I. Jane — read The Dork Report Review — wasn’t sta­tioned there). Van­tage Point is a lit­tle more cre­ative in imag­in­ing a worst-case-scenario of a pres­i­den­tial assas­si­na­tion, but has no inter­est in the reper­cus­sions beyond a Rashomon-like recount­ing of the imme­di­ate aftermath.

So audi­ences get films like this, where shad­owy CIA oper­a­tives sneak around Iraq and Jor­dan, sav­ing the world from Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism. They have seem­ingly lim­it­less resources but no gov­ern­ment over­sight, and any­thing is pos­si­ble with a lit­tle com­puter hack­ing. Mean­while, more seri­ous and real­is­tic movies are ignored, like In the Val­ley of Elah (read The Dork Report review) and the truly excel­lent but emo­tion­ally dev­as­tat­ing United 93. In com­par­i­son, Scott’s Black Hawk Down was unafraid to recre­ate actual events still raw in the Amer­i­can public’s mem­ory: the cat­a­strophic marine incur­sion into Soma­lia in 1993. And even to limit the scope to Scott’s own oeu­vre, King­dom of Heaven is a much smarter con­sid­er­a­tion of the clash of faiths in the Mid­dle East.

Leo meets cute with an Iran­ian nurse (Gol­shifteh Farahani)

Body of Lies is Rus­sell Crowe’s fourth film with Scott, fol­low­ing Glad­i­a­tor, A Good Year, and Amer­i­can Gang­ster. Here, he packs on some seri­ous poundage to enter the same schlubby mode he debuted in Michael Mann’s The Insider, sea­soned with a lit­tle of the crass bas­tard he played in A Good Year. Leonardo DiCaprio, on tem­po­rary loan from Mar­tin Scors­ese, sports a scrappy beard but still looks like a teenager. The pretty boy is con­stantly get­ting beaten up, cut, bruised, and los­ing fin­gers. But he meets cute with pretty Iran­ian nurse Aisah (Gol­shifteh Fara­hani), so that’s alright, then.

Offi­cial movie site: www.body-of-lies.com

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report: