Not so great, Scott.(FILM)(Ridley Scott's Body of Lies)(Movie review)

NEVER let it be said that Hollywood doesn't respond to the free market. For several years after 9/11, and especially after the invasion of Iraq, the movie business busied itself making exactly the sort of films you'd expect from an industry where Sean Penn passes for a moderate. There were anti-war polemics, paranoid thrillers about conspiracies in high places, and gritty, "realistic" films about terrorism and American foreign policy in which the military-industrial complex usually ended up painted in darker hues than the terrorists themselves. Occasionally these movies were good (usually when they were deliberately fantastical, as with Matt Damon's Jason Bourne cycle), but more often they were hectoring and dreadful. Inevitably, audiences stayed away in droves, while thumbsucking critics lamented the fact that moviegoers just didn't want to confront the realities of war--a pattern that culminated in last autumn's box-office slaughter, when Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Lions for Lambs earned, I believe, $107.50 at the box office between them.

So finally, finally, the movie industry began turning out a different sort of War on Terror movie--a less left-wing variant on the genre, aimed at a middle ground between Jason Bourne and John Rambo, between anti-Americanism and jingoism. Call it the liberal-internationalist action film: Last year's Kingdom was the first entrant in the genre, and it's since been joined by Traitor, with Don Cheadle as an American Muslim deep undercover in a terror cell, and now by the glossy, globetrotting Body of Lies, which is based on a novel by the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (a noted liberal internationalist, naturally), and which underwhelms in every respect save for the talent involved in making it.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe headline the film, playing a CIA agent and his Langley handler, respectively, with Ridley Scott supervising them from the director's chair. DiCaprio's Roger Ferris is a tanned and bearded Arabist, capable of blending into a teeming Baghdad marketplace and romancing a lovely Persian nurse, but indefatigable in his pursuit of Al-Saleem (Alon Abutbul), a terrorist mastermind responsible for a string of European bombings. Crowe's Ed Hoffman is a pudgy, pasty unilateralist who watches over Ferris via the footage beamed into Virginia from satellites and Predators, and orders hits and betrayals via his earpiece while ferrying his kids to soccer games. He's the Ugly American with too much technology and not enough perspective, and Crowe masks his good looks and plays up the schlub factor, as he did in last year's American ...