Roger suspects he’d be better off putting his fate in the hands of the nonextremist Muslims, personified by the head of Jordan’s secret service, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong is nothing short of brilliant in the role). “All you need to do is trust me, little buddy,” he tells Roger, and you want to prod Roger to run for his life. Crowe’s implosive performance is lethally funny and dangerously scary, the kind of juicy experiment Marlon Brando often tried to shake up a tired genre (remember him as a killer cowboy in a dress in The Missouri Breaks?). In short, Ed is the avuncular image America shows to the world, swilling cereal in his pj’s, telling his wife he’ll come to bed just as soon as he’s through “saving civilization.” What Crowe reveals, in tandem with Scott and Monahan, is the moral rot behind the facade of Uncle Sam waving the flag of homeland security. “Hi, there, little buddy” is his standard greeting to Roger, whom he manipulates without conscience. Crowe plays Ed as flabby, fiftyish and friendly to a fault. Factor in an Arkansas accent and you might judge the Aussie guilty of actorly excess.
Crowe added 50 pounds to his gladiator frame to play the shambling suburban husband and father who uses a cellphone, a laptop and sometimes a personal visit to issue Roger his orders to kill. But unlike James Bond or Jason Bourne, Roger is fallibly human, an idealist stuck with the painstaking work of negotiating a path through shifting alliances, none more tangled than America’s own.Įnter Crowe as good ol’ boy Ed Hoffman, the CIA’s reigning spymaster. Roger, wounded in Iraq, can speak Arabic and wear disguises to penetrate a cell whose next attack may be on home turf.
#Body of lies movie part 9 series
DiCaprio, in top form, plays Roger Ferris, the CIA’s man on the ground in the Middle East, trying to stop a series of bombings in Europe orchestrated by Al-Saleem, an Al Qaeda operative based in Jordan. And the crafty script by Departed Oscar winner William Monahan stays coiled and ready to spring. Body of Lies, based on a 2007 novel by Washington Post foreign-affairs columnist David Ignatius, has the gritty feel of something observed firsthand. Who else would cast Russell Crowe as Uncle Sam and Leonardo DiCaprio as a pawn in his game? In Body of Lies, Scott laces the action with simmering drama heightened by his killer sense of mischief. Scott gets regularly gonged for letting style ride herd over substance, despite Thelma and Louise, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster and other potent proof to the contrary. Snobs have dissed the British director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator as a decorator tarred by his start in lowly commercials. Here’s a combustible spy thriller that wires Syriana to Three Days of the Condor, heats it with Patriot Act politics, and then lets Ridley Scott light the fuse. Whoppers have become the lingua franca of our culture, useful in presidential campaigns, Wall Street bailouts, even diet books.
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