Body of Lies: Critic Reviews

Working from a screenplay by William Monahan, Scott takes rusty '80s cliches from the days when we were playing nuclear chicken with Russia and retrofits them to the post-9/11 world. He exposes how weary those old spy tropes really are.

Mr. Scott's professionalism is, as ever, present in every frame and scene, but this time it seems singularly untethered from anything like zeal, conviction or even curiosity.

Body of Lies is big and bombastic, confused and irritable - a 20th-century blockbuster struggling to adapt (too little, too late) to a 21st-century terrain.

The plot occasionally becomes convoluted and murky, but when it trains its focus on matters of treachery and intrigue, Body of Lies is exciting and compelling.

Body of Lies clicks along at an engaging pace, legibly limning its multitude of characters and even throwing in a good bit of wry humor.

The movie is an urgent current-events thriller that falls somewhere between Syriana and the Bourne movies.

Art may be imitating life, but it sure makes for dull movies. Body of Lies is the latest example of what a crutch this has become -- show grainy satellite images, cut to a chase in a crowded bazaar, discuss 'intel'. Repeat.

It's a study in semisimilitude, more Google-Earthly than grounded in feelings.

On this basic premise builds a complicated story plied with onion layers of perspective and cunning.

As a movie seeking to tell a story, Body of Lies is a confused jumble.

Body of Lies is an A-list project with B-game results.

The movie isn't witty or memorable, but it keeps you on edge, and it's the first war-on-terror film to weave its anti-U.S. politics so deeply into the narrative that the characters don't need to speechify.

Smart and tightly drawn; it has a throat-gripping urgency and some serious insights, and Scott has a greater command of space and a more explicit way with violence than most thriller directors.

Body of Lies contains enough you can believe, or almost believe, that you wish so much of it weren't sensationally implausible.

DiCaprio's solid, though I wonder if a real CIA agent could get away with looking so earnest every second. Crowe has the right idea, in addition to all the fun: Just throw it away, throw it away and pretty soon you build yourself a clever characterization

This is a little too slick and commanding for its own good; despite Crowe and DiCaprio's best efforts, their characters keep getting flattened by the steamroller narrative.

Body of Lies is most alive while relishing the surveillance and communications tools abused by Hoffman, tools that supply him military intelligence, but not the smarts or scruples to effectively use it.

Unfortunately, we've seen variations on this story a dozen times.

Russell Crowe's portrayal of an overweight, amoral CIA honcho in the Middle East thriller Body of Lies is mesmerizing, chilling, disturbing to the bone and one of the best performances of the year.

It's no surprise that Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe are so good in Body of Lies, Ridley Scott's thrilling film about the war on terror, its costs and its frustrations.

Body of Lies is yet another in a long, tiresome line of loud, violent, nauseating and incoherent riffs on how mercenary and inhuman the spooks in the C.I.A. are, even to each other.

Neither the location-based verisimilitude of Ridley Scott's shooting style nor the estimable Middle East expertise of source-material author David Ignatius can disguise Body of Lies as anything other than the contrived phony-baloney it is.

Body of Lies is being hailed in some quarters as a 'new' kind of war thriller. While this glitzy production may attract audiences suffering from battle fatigue, it's nothing of the sort.

Body of Lies is a riddle wrapped in an enigma served with a side of mystery meat. It's very watchable, with some entertaining action beats, kind of a Syriania as scripted by Tom Clancy, a The Kingdom with a little less C.S.I.

Body of Lies is more than anything a missed opportunity -- or perhaps, given its cellular phoniness, a series of missed connections.