Throughout his
career, Don Cheadle has proved himself a superlative minimalist, a man with a
gift for effortlessly conveying a deep, complicated inner life. That skill is
put to good use in the international thriller Traitor, with Cheadle brilliantly playing a man of fierce
intelligence, focus, and efficiency whose allegiances are shrouded in mystery,
especially in the early going.
Cheadle stars
as a devoutly Muslim former U.S. Special Ops officer who began associating with
radical Islamic terrorists during a stint in Afghanistan. Since then, he's
effectively operated off the grid, popping up during a botched arms deal, a
prison break in Yemen, and a terrorist bombing in France. Cheadle's sinister
deeds put him on a collision course with Guy Pearce, an FBI agent whose
background echoes that of the shadowy man he's pursuing.
Traitor is essentially two films. One is a superbly acted,
suspenseful character study about a man whose faith pulls him in antithetical
directions. The other is a much more generic, forgettable cat-and-mouse yarn
about dogged G-men pursuing elusive prey. In a cinema world that all too often
stereotypes Muslims as one-dimensional bad guys, Traitor dares to take Islam seriously; if not for the
troubling fact that most of the Muslims here are terrorists willing to die for
Jihad, this would be one of the most sympathetic, nuanced depictions of Islam
in recent memory. Cheadle's immersion in the murky underworld of international
terrorism is so fascinating that the FBI stuff can't help but look wan and rote
by comparison. Without its mesmerizing lead performance, Traitor easily could have devolved into direct-to-DVD
fodder. Instead, Cheadle illustrates how great acting can elevate
standard-issue material into something much more haunting and ambiguous.