Rendition

WORTH-IT: (Gavin Hood) CIA Analyst Douglas Freeman, played by a wimpy Jake Gyllenhal questions his newest assignment after witnessing an unorthodox interrogation by secret detention officers, outside the US. When Egyptian-native, now-US resident, Anwar El-Ibrahimi, played by Omar Metwally, goes missing seemingly in the air on a flight to America from South Africa, his wife, Reese Witherspoon searches for answers to his suspicious disappearance. What she discovers is not only a brick wall surrounding the CIA's covert operations for terrorist control, but an icy Meryl Streep who refuses to budge in favor of her American counterparts. Rendition is the story of an uncovering of hard and ugly truth of a counter-terrorist plan taking extreme measures to hold its reputation. There are too many turns to give you a bare-boned plot in this review, but I can say that the film moves through them easily. Hood seamlessly entraps his audience into a whats wrong and right and who is in the wrong and right. Until the end, no one knows the truth and that keeps this film on its feet. he might have played up the darkness too much, as well as the silence, no doubt trying to overlay the film with El-Ibrahimi's torture, but all in all the film comes across as it should: sad, hopeless, but good and truthful. No Oscar-worthiness here, but a good story, a jolt of reality, and a pleasing film.