RENDITION

After overblown stories of walkouts by critics during its Toronto film festival debut, "Rendition" proves to have enough substance, momentum, and drama to validate its entertainment value as a politically charged thriller.

Reese Witherspoon plays Isabella, the pregnant wife of Egyptian American Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), a chemical engineer who gets abducted by U.S. Special Forces on suspicion of terrorism upon his return from a business convention in South Africa.

El-Ibrahimi is secreted to a North African dungeon where local police kingpin Abasi gleefully tortures him with the tacit assistance of CIA cat’s paw Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who survived the suicide bombing that gave rise to El-Ibrahimi’s abduction.

Isabella discovers duty-free charges on her husband’s credit card that refute the airline’s claim that El-Ibrahimi was never on his return flight. She visits former college friend Alan (Peter Sarsgaard) in Washington D.C. where he now works as an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin).

Running parallel to Isabella’s quest to locate her missing husband, and the barbarous abuse he suffers abroad, is the backstory of the suicide bombing which El-Ibrahimi is suspected of being involved in, as it relates to Abasi’s romantically confused daughter who mistakenly dates a terrorist.

Audiences concerned that "Rendition" errs on the side of bleeding-heart liberals can take solace in the film’s willingness to cast blame for the origin of "extraordinary rendition," as part of U.S. government policy, on former President Clinton.

Humanitarians will find encouragement in the film’s scathing tone that takes aim at the very nature of torture, secret or otherwise, as an impotent method for discovering facts. Gyllenhaal’s increasingly sensitive CIA agent does some impressive thematic dart throwing by quoting Shakespeare on the subject in the third act, lest anyone forget that the subject of torture has been well chewed over by stronger minds over the course of history.

Suspicion is a powerful deceiver that turns a quick circle back to its creator. At the helm of the CIA rendition program is Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), a brainwashed black widow ideologue whose views on terrorism prevention ironically align with Abasi’s limited sense of justice.

Director Gavin Hood ("Tsotsi") does a serviceable job with upstart screenwriter Kelley Sane’s written-on-the-wall script. And although supporting cast members Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep suffer from underwritten roles, the actors appropriately emphasize their characters’ egos as guiding beacons of damning hubris. They are people who live in self-promoted private hells that they are only too happy to impose others.

"Rendition" comes out in a season of politically charged R-word film tittles (see "Redacted" and "Reservation Road"), set to assault cinema marquees with bloody threads of alliteration. What these films share in common is the death of young people by mechanized forces.

Cars, bullets, and bombs dismantle human life with an abstract force and logic that demands scapegoats. "Rendition" is the best of the three movies because it represents a humanitarian viewpoint rather than a political one. It might not rise to the complexity of "Syriana," but "Rendition" isn’t a flimsy movie either.

Rated R. 122 mins.