[5]

Ridley Scott directs Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in a story about a CIA agent (DiCaprio) trying to bust a terrorist leader in Jordan while having his chain yanked by both the Jordan and American governments. I could also describe it as two hours of watching Leonardo DiCaprio talk on his cell phone. But I won’t be quite that snarky. This time.

Body of Lies moves very quickly and with admirable panache, thanks to Sir Ridley, but I wish the movie gave more screen time to the relationship between DiCaprio’s character and Russell Crowe’s. Crowe plays his CIA boss back in Langley, Virginia. There’s only a couple of scenes in which the two are on screen together, but their relationship is maintained through phone calls throughout the film. It’s a relationship that never really blossoms — you don’t know if DiCaprio truly trusts Crowe with his life, and you don’t know if Crowe really cares about DiCaprio. But when they interact, I couldn’t help but feel ‘this’ is where the movie is, ‘this’ is what it wants to be about. Instead, act two decides to introduce a Muslim girlfriend for DiCaprio, which leads to some warm and humorous scenes (especially when he meets the woman’s family for dinner), but I found myself drifting away from the movie at that point. Still, DiCaprio has enough charisma to get me through to the end. With Oscar Isaac.