Body of Lies Review

The sharpest joke in this film is logistical. Russell Crowe runs the whole operation from suburban Virginia by cell phone, ordering men into danger between school runs and juice boxes, and it works for roughly forty minutes before it starts to insulate him from anything the story can do to him. Ridley Scott shoots Jordan and Iraq with his usual hard competence, satellite plates and drone footage cut against the ground action, and there is a real idea buried here about intelligence work as a contest of invented stories.

Mark Strong walks off with the picture as Hani Salaam, the Jordanian spymaster who dresses better, lies better and declines to explain himself, and every scene he shares with DiCaprio tightens. Ferris is written as a decent man in an indecent trade, which is thin enough that the script has to torture him twice to manufacture feeling. Weakest is the romance with the Iranian nurse, three brief scenes that the third act then treats as sufficient reason to detonate the plot. William Monahan keeps announcing his themes in speeches rather than testing them against what anyone actually does.