Rendition (15)

Terror of another sort

Contrary to the claims of some of its detractors, Hollywood has a very strong sense of right and wrong, at least in front of the cameras; but it's a stunted, childish version of morality that doesn't have any application to real life. In real life, when you're trying to decide on the right thing to do, you'll generally take some account of the possible consequences, and sometimes decide that the end justifies the means; in Hollywood, only villains think like that. And so, for example, in The Specialist (1994), when young thugs nick a bus seat from a heavily pregnant woman, Sylvester Stallone teaches them a lesson by beating them up and throwing them through the bus window: that the woman's journey is now going to be delayed while the mess is cleaned up and police take statements is irrelevant.

Or take Con Air (1997), in which nice FBI agent John Cusack prevents his nasty colleagues shooting down an airliner full of escaped convicts in order to save the life of wrongly convicted Nicolas Cage – and who cares that the plane then crashes in central Las Vegas, causing damage to property and, presumably, though the film doesn't show it, numerous deaths? Doing right only applies to what's under your nose.

These films are trashy, but the same moral scheme creeps into more literate, apparently intelligent films: films such as Rendition. The title refers to "extraordinary rendition", the practice, sanctioned by the US government, of transporting terrorist suspects in secret to territories where US laws don't apply – particularly laws prohibiting torture. (We tend to associate this exclusively with the Bush administration, but as a character in the film points out, it started under Clinton.)

The film revolves around the fictional case of an Egyptian chemical engineer, Anwar El-Ibrahimi (played by Omar Metwally), suspected of having been in contact with a notorious Islamic militant. Arriving at a US airport from a conference in South Africa, Anwar is seized, hooded and thrown into a plane: next thing he knows, he is naked and shackled to a chair in an unnamed North African country, being questioned by a nasty Arab secret policeman under the gaze of a CIA operative. When he is not locked up in a dark hole too small for him to stretch out, he is being beaten, waterboarded – in effect, torture by part-drowning – and electrocuted.

What the authorities don't know, but we do, is that aside from the details of name and nationality, Anwar is as American as apple pie. An NYU graduate, he lives in the suburbs with his nice American wife and a son called Jeremy – how can a man who calls his son Jeremy be a fundamentalist?

Meanwhile, back home, the wife, Izzy (Reese Witherspoon), desperate to find her husband, starts poking around with help from an old flame who went into politics: pretty soon, they come up against Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep), a frosty intelligence boss for whom questions of decency and due process are finicky next to the big question of defending the US and saving lives. Anwar's torture and Izzy's quest are intercut with another story, about the Arab policeman's daughter and her young, radical lover.

Despite the almost unbearable weight of its good intentions, Gavin Hood's film does all the things you want a drama to do: it engages your sympathies, creates suspense, and the narrative is superbly paced (though the denouement delivers a bizarre and totally superfluous twist in the chronology). The photography, especially on location in Marrakech, is beautiful.

As the CIA analyst observing Anwar's torture, and gradually having his conscience pricked, Jake Gyllenhaal starts well but blunders out of his depth – a sequence in which he is drinks to drown out the horror of it all had me squirming – and Streep is pretty much on ice-maiden autopilot; but otherwise, the acting is excellent.

To its credit, too, Kelley Sane's script strives to complicate our stereotypes, to give some genuine texture to the Arab half of the story: early on, the secret policeman is seen in bed, playing with his small daughter like any American dad, while his sister represents a version of liberated, sophisticated Muslim womanhood unfamiliar in American films.

But, in the end, Rendition lacks the nerve to break away completely from comforting stereotype. So the policeman's older daughter is on the run from an arranged marriage, and her father (though I don't want to take anything away from Yigal Naor's performance) is a shaven-headed, hooded-eyed heavy. The stereotyping is moral as well as cultural: Anwar is self-evidently innocent, and the thought that ends can justify means is just a self-justifying platitude in the mouth of a Machiavellian spook. It doesn't help that, for most of the film, Izzy is heavily pregnant – and, as Sylvester Stallone knows, a pregnant woman trumps all moral arguments.

What if things had been different, though? What if Anwar were guilty, or at least his guilt seemed possible? What if we admitted that the Streep character, when she suggested that his rights had to be weighed against the possibility of thousands of dead, had a point? I'm not saying the conclusion would be any different (I hope it would be the same), but at least we would have had an argument about it.

Rendition is a well-intentioned film, and an enjoyable one, but, in the end, that's not quite the same as a good one.