Rendition: Critic Reviews

Rendition makes the case that torture, whatever name it goes under, is indefensible, yet one can agree with that view entirely and still feel that the movie is just a borderline exploitation of what anyone who reads the papers already knows.

Its clumsy efforts are toward an honest and difficult goal, which is to use the resources of mainstream movie-making to get viewers thinking about a moral crisis that many of us would prefer to ignore.

This movie is composed in the increasingly familiar international hectic-mosaic style, with a note of justified paranoia.

Rendition, while engrossing, does not grab us as it should.

As it goes about hitting its predictable marks, including a reassuring burst of moral outrage, Rendition suffers, finally, from not being extraordinary enough.

Rendition is a reminder that, in the wrong hands, political outrage can be a slog.

[Hood] can be accused of one-siding the debate over interrogation tactics like water-boarding and electrocution. But since when do movies have to be fair and balanced?

It's all too simplistic to really engage the deeply complex dilemma it seeks to pass judgment on.

It raises worthwhile quandaries and delivers flashes of acting prowess -- from Streep in particular.

Rendition has multiple crisscrossing plots, a cliff-hanger climax, and a strong current of hope -- that an individual's conscience can triumph over careerism and bureaucratic moral blindness.

What the film documents is that we have lost faith in due process and the rule of law, and have forfeited the moral high ground.

Director Hood did the satisfying South African Oscar winner Tsotsi, and he wrangles Rendition's multiple storylines with skill. He cannot elevate the writing, however.

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

Hood squanders the film's considerable starpower by failing to elicit sharp performances from his marquee names.

At every turn the screenplay turns geopolitics into Lifetime Channel pablum.

Rendition succumbs to a fatal imbalance brought on by terminal star power.

Hot off the headlines, this is one timely thriller that delivers its message with a huge punch and no heavy speechifying.

Even Witherspoon, normally the most spirited of performers who can inject even limited characters and blah scripts with her own spark, can do little but mope around and search for different ways to look worried.

Morose instead of outraged and static instead of penetrating.

Give us a genuine dilemma, put us on the spot. Rendition -- though it is a very good, challenging film that will have you thinking and talking afterward -- doesn't.

It's one thing for a thriller to be timely, quite another for it to function as Rendition does, a gripping piece of entertainment with a clear head on its shoulders.

Hot off the headlines and onto the screen, this is a rarity -- a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying.

If these new, allegedly topical movies are to make us feel anything -- to move us toward any action or even just toward any fresh realization -- they need to at least seem alive on the screen, instead of just courting our polite, measured applause.

Rendition's worst flaw is its political deck-stacking, with its willingness to win the viewer's sympathy by showcasing the least defensible instance of extraordinary rendition imaginable.

We are ambushed by a simplistic storyline that's more interested in sermonizing and demonizing than existing in the real world where things aren't as clear-cut as the movie would like us to believe.