Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.

At 58%, Rotten Tomatoes is being generous with this film.

Look, I love Ridley Scott as a visual filmmaker. I think he’s got an exceptional eye, and his sense of how to stage a sequence has gotten more and more impressive over time.

BLACK HAWK DOWN, for example, was one of the first few films I bought on BluRay. It’s dead sexy in high-def. That’s why I own it. They spent a lot of fucking money making that movie, and it shakes my entire porch when I crank it up. As a movie to actually sit down and watch from start to finish, it is a harrowing visceral experience, overwhelming, and it’s a politically confused film in some fascinating ways. But I don’t own it because of what it says... I own it because of how it says it.

In fact, if you want to argue for a larger subtext in Ridley Scott’s career as a whole, you could, and I’d hardly categorize him as any sort of left-leaning or liberal filmmaker. If he’s got a political message to his films, I think he’s far more interested in the grind of the machine than he is in reform. I think a world at war is a world where Ridley Scott knows how to shoot it and make it sexy. I’m really interested in seeing what he does with BRAVE NEW WORLD, because it’s a total about-face from this sort of military-might-on-display car commercial sheen that looks like it costs ungodly amounts of money. And I think BODY OF LIES is, as far as Scott is concerned, a dead end of aesthetic. There are any number of wow shots in this film, any number of impressively staged physical sequences. Leonardo Di Caprio and Russell Crowe both threw themselves at their roles, both of them slapping on the Southern drawls and acting really hard into cell phones for most of the shoot. You like the Sorkin walk-and-talk? Well, this is that, but instead of Rob Lowe and Martin Sheen in the hallway between the Oval Office and the Kitchen, it’s Di Caprio in the middle of the desert at a hideout for a terrorist cell and it’s Russell Crowe dropping his little girl off at soccer practice. But it’s still just yak yak high-tech yak yak. It’s mining the exact same political subtext as EAGLE EYE, and it’s just about as deep and important in what it’s saying.

Until I opened the IMDb page, I didn’t realize this was based on a novel. I am shocked. I had no idea how this film got made, and after a while, that’s all I could think about while watching it unfold. “How did this happen? At what stage did this look like a good idea, a story that had to be told?” I can’t imagine. I’m almost compelled now to read the book to see if there would be anything about it that I liked, or if it just stacks up different on the page. I knew that William Monahan wrote it, and to me, it just felt like an airball pretty much all the way through. I don’t buy a word of it. I don’t buy Roger Ferris, the CIA operative in the Middle East who works (mostly) by remote contact with Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) back in Washington. I don’t buy the metaphorically hamhanded romantic subplot between Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani) and Ferris. I particularly don’t buy the big finish, and without giving it away, I’ll just say there was one moment where I thought this film was going to suddenly earn back some merit, where I thought they could pull it out... and they chicken out in the biggest way possible. It’s a final insult after the previous hour and a half of constant affront.

There’s one character that stands out, and if they wanted to make movies about him, that would have been a fascinating and worthwhile choice. Mark Strong’s work as Hani, head of Jordanian Intelligence, is so impressive that I would imagine you’ll see him show up in approximately 134 films produced between 2010 and 2012. He’s “that guy,” starting now. I have talked about him in previous set visit pieces and reviews, and I’ve been watching his work impress in recent films like ROCKNROLLA, STARDUST, MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, SUNSHINE, SYRIANA, and OLIVER TWIST. Here, he’s given the best role in the script, the one role that is played at the right pitch, written with some scent of truth. He’s written just well enough that Strong runs with it. His work here reminds me of the work Alec Guiness did for David Lean over the years. It’s not “Mark Strong” in the film; it’s Hani. When audiences see him in KICK-ASS or SHERLOCK HOLMES, I’m willing to bet he’s not going to look like he does here, and he won’t look the same in either of them. He’s the very modern model of a British character actor, and for him, this movie’s one big clip reel.

But that’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

Truth be told, the film bothers me because it doesn’t work if you just want to approach it as mindless entertainment, and it doesn’t work if you expect something more. I don’t think there’s much entertainment value for me personally in watching Hollywood slap together a cartoon character James Bond villain style 21st century terrorist cell leader, just so they can kill a bunch of brown people in their drive to bring him down. I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m being honest. I don’t find it cathartic or entertaining. I think it’s a troubling occupation to be in right now, making big popcorn films about Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia, and not because of my own personal feelings about the war. This isn’t World War II. If you’re fighting Hitler, I undertand the need for a propaganda machine that’s working overtime, subverting Hollywood’s biggest guns to America’s purpose. I get that. I think WWII propaganda is some of the most amazing iconography in Hollywood history. But right now, I don’t think we’re dealing with Hitler. I don’t think we need to be cranking out puffed up commercials for just how right our might makes us. And, sure, the movie opens with a quote about what happens to people who do evil in the world, and there are a few distinct buttons in the film to underline the theme, “Don’t start shit if you don’t want shit,” all while never really engaging with any of the various ideas it raises.

At the start of the film, there’s some business about how the terrorists all realized that fighting the CIA is like fighting a man from the future, and so to fight a man from the future, you must live like a man from the past. Completely be opposite him. Go off the grid. The CIA can only track you via electronics if you use electronics, and so the terrorists have gone back to messages carried as folded paper in handshakes, or on whispers in public places, passed carrier to carrier. As low tech as low tech gets, so low tech that the CIA can’t track any of it. Those are some good ideas, and they go resolutely unexplored in any depth in the film. Later, Di Caprio comes up with a fairly ingenious sting operation, and it sounds like the film’s finally kicking in, but it really doesn’t. And that ending I alluded to... the way the film just ditches out on the audience right there... it just sums up the film’s greatest misstep: it has no idea what the fuck it’s really about.

It’s hard to make a political statement if you don’t know what you’re saying, but it’s also hard to make sure you’re not sending the wrong messages entirely. This is empty provocation. Marc Streitenfeld has scored the last few Ridley Scott films, and before that, he worked in the music department on many more. He does a top-notch job here, propulsive and atmospheric. Alexander Witt, a huge name in the second-unit world, steps up as the director of photography here, and, no surprise, it’s a great looking film. Ridley Scott can certainly afford to work with anyone he wants to at this point, and I actually like seeing the way he promotes from within the ranks. Most of his collaborators now are people he’s been working with in some form for a long time now. The great editor Pietro Scalia is, of course, back onboard, and the movie’s genuinely exhilarating at times. So everyone’s work here, technically speaking, is top-notch. This is what The Best Hollywood Money Can Buy looks like in 2008. But all this effort in this particular case is about what? Is this movie saying something? Anything? And if not, if this is just a thrill ride, then why isn’t any of this any fun? If this is meant to just be a badass good-guys/bad-guys thing, why isn’t it more exciting? A movie like BODY OF LIES bothers me in some ways more than an outright awful film because there’s so much raw should-be-great on display, so many talented people in the mix, and with that much energy all working towards the same end, for this to be the result is a disappointment, plain and simple. I’ve heard a few people say that this struck them as more of a Tony Scott movie, but that’s not fair. This movie’s terrible in a whole different way than Tony Scott’s terrible films are. This movie is bad in that special way that only Ridley can manage. It’s GI JANE bad. It’s BLACK RAIN bad. And coming on the heels of the ambitious but charmingly imperfect AMERICAN GANGSTER, this is doubly disappointing.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles