Saturday, October 18, 2008

Body of Lies

Everything in this life is summarized by titles. Consider the school days, where it is customary to give titles like Mr. Stud, Ms. Photogenic, etc to every student. Your English teacher must have taught you about the importance of ‘titles’ when writing essays and blogs. Some days back I read a book ‘Joker in the Pack’ and understood the meaning of title only after completing 90% of the book and boye! it was apt (Bad reader I am)
Body of lies’ is too a strange title when you evaluate it from its trailers. From trailers it looks like an espionage killer thriller (‘spy game’ types). But again DO go by the title when you go for it…

Movie has two great actors; Russell Crowe (Ed) and Leonardo DiCaprio (Roger). Plot wise, not much new is there in it. Russell Crowe works for CIA (Los Angles) and gives directions to DiCaprio (his CIA operative in Iraq, Jordan, Dubai, Syria, etc etc). Movie does revolve from one country to other to another symbolizing geographical reach of terror. DiCaprio is given assignments by his boss and after his initial assignment in Iraq, is sent to Jordan to get Al Salim (head of a terror group). There he seeks help of Jordan’s GID (general intelligence dept.) to nab Al Salim. Meanwhile Ed plants another operative thereby jeopardizing the plan and getting Roger hurt. Roger while getting the treatment becomes affectionate towards the nurse. Then there are more plans to nab Al Salim which flop….In the climax, the nurse is taken up by Al Salim’s men and wants Roger in return. Rogers agrees and as he is to be executed, SOMEBODY (not me) saves him…Who??…find out. In addition, movie has some high intensity nasty dialogue-baazi in it. There are dialogues which may sound provocative to some; for example ‘He wants to come America in one piece and go to heavens in thousands’, ‘He is the one who touches his head 4-5 times a day’ and few more. One scene which caused the whole audience to applaud happened when the Al-Salem men foxed American spy-satellites in the middle of the desert...technolgies cannot outdo everybody (a reminder!!)

Castwise this movie attracts two very famous men of Hollywood. Both have done legendary movies in past and are great crowd pullers. Crowe in this movie looks mighty fatty and carries a strange nerdy look (one who can live without oxygen but not without specs and earphones). Denzil Washington or Bruce Willis could have easily replaced Crowe here. On the contrary, DiCaprio is fantastically shot. He runs, he kills and he acts brilliantly. Though one might fear about him going for stereotyping killer roles (The Departed, Blood Diamond types). A special mention for Mark Strong (played head of Jordanian GID). An amazing scene presence and emotionless dialogue delievery made him at par with the other two actors.

If you like kills, thrills, spy-satellites and offcourse, the two legendry men…go for it
JUST REMEMBER !!
“Nobody’s innocent in this shit”

3 comments:

Luscious Sealed Lips said...

The nurse and her kidnapping gives this movie the masala that Hollywood seems to be getting quite alot of, now.

Will watch it anyway for the "Crowd pullers", the actors.

Kisses.

Kush said...

i liked this movie 2.
nice review.

akd said...

I liked the movie and the ur review.

High-altitude surveillance and the the fucking dialogs are really good.