..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Traitor
Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

There's a curious irony about most movies that deal with the threat of terrorism whether they're cloaked in the fantasy world of Bond or are the more sober-sided Siege. The films are generally fairly good at identifying the peril and ramping up anxiety. But when it comes to the actual mechanics and putting it into a credible, human context they fall seriously short.

Filmmakers and film executives have, in part, been prone to accept Jack Nicholson's dicta "you can't take the truth" in so far as audiences are concerned on this subject. The movie theater remains a cozy venue to address our inner fears and sugar coat the consequences with resolutions that are fanciful and fleetingly assuring.

Traitor, to its credit, isn't that sort of warm bath entertainment. The yarn of an American-raised Islamic man who becomes involved with an international terrorist cell takes great pains to address the complexity of an operation with 9/11 consequences. It also strives to put not only a human face on the adversaries but to put their ideologies into a persuasive rather than fanatical (and dismissive) light.

The sleight-of-hand required from writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff is balancing the intricate weave of the politics with the genre demands of what's essentially a spy thriller. It's a daunting struggle and the filmmaker winds up missing the mark on both accounts even though he makes good points along a highly circuitous route.

The title character, Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), is introduced as an apolitical gun runner supplying weapons to the highest bidder regardless of ideology. He runs afoul of the authorities in Yemen and is imprisoned. It's in lock up that we see his religious commitment and that's not lost on a captain (Said Taghmaoui) of a radical Islamic cell.

He's is also being wooed by an FBI agent (Guy Pearce) dangling the carrot of freedom in exchange for information. Horn winds up throwing in his lot with his brethren and after a prison break the film evolves into the sort of hounds pursuing the fox saga that echoes the likes of Day of the Jackal.

The twist to it all is that Horn is a CIA plant whose real purpose appears to be known only by a single rogue agent (Jeff Daniels). When that operative is murdered his exit options may close shut.

The density of Traitor is probably better served as a cable series on the order of Sleeper Cell. It hops, skips and jumps from the mid-East to Europe, Canada and the U.S. like a Fodor's Guide on steroids. In the process the actual mission gets short shrift. We get a pretty good idea of the intricacies of financing, the precision of the cat's cradle of intercontinental cogs in the operation and how to build a bomb. However, the end game gets lost in the jumble and without a clear doomsday scenario in sight the drama is sadly toothless.

Still, it's the core dilemma of conflicted identities and allegiances that is most crippling to the picture. Changing horses mid-stream winds up complicating rather than elucidating the hero's plight. His ambivalence while recognizable is ultimately unresolved in a way that leaves the film grasping for a coda. The best that can be offered is platitudes and band-aid patriotism … and that's not good enough.

- Leonard Klady