Fridae

The history of cinema has shown that five years after any particularly major and traumatic event (such as the Vietnam War or Sept 11), filmmakers start to produce movies that reflect on the event and its implications. So right now, audiences are seeing a host of dramas that explore the controversial war in Iraq and America's equally controversial role in Middle-East politics. It is a movie trend that began last year with Syriana and Good Night & Good Luck, and continues this year with Rendition and Lions for Lambs.

Rendition is a rather simplistic melodrama, but it is still a worthy melodrama that dares to tackle issues that not everyone is keen on finding out. In her first role since winning the Oscar for Best Actress, Reese Witherspoon plays a woman happily married to an ordinary Egyptian-American (Omar Metwally) who is suspected of being involved in a terrorist bombing of a city square in Africa.

Omar is hooded and taken away to foreign prison where he is brutally tortured and forced to confess to terrible crimes. His frightening interrogation is watched over by a CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is supporting the bitch-from-hell CIA boss (Meryl Streep). Meanwhile, Reese frantically tries to find where her husband has been taken to...

Like Crash, Babel and Syriana, Rendition is a complex multi-stranded movie with numerous characters linked together in ways they are not aware of. And though the connections sometimes seem tenuous and the political issues oversimplified, Rendition is still made watchable by the superb performances of the actors - which include the unknown Middle Eastern cast.

Our biggest problem with this film is that it seems to pin the blame on the Clinton administration for initiating the "extraordinary rendition" act, even though every newspaper-reading person will tell you that the worst instances of it are being carried out by the morally-bankrupt Bush administration.