Before it reverts to standard thriller tropes, this tale of an Islamic double agent takes a more thoughtful attitude to East-West relations than one might expect.
Don Cheadle plays a half-American, half-Sudanese explosives expert who was once attached to the US military but now seems to have gone rogue, helping a Jihadist terror cell to prepare a homeland bombing campaign. In pursuit of him is a sympathetic Fed (Guy Pearce) whose father wass a Baptist minister, so he knows a thing or two about doing God's work: "Every religion has more than one face", he says, the film's clearest attempt to promote the spirit of tolerance. Traitor covers a lot of geopolitical territory – Madrid, Marseilles, Yemen, London, Toronto, the US – while Cheadle holds the centre dependably as a devout Muslim wrestling with his conscience.
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