Ethnocentrism and full-blown racism are no strangers to Hollywood cinema. In fact, they’re sort of mainstays. From the sprawling Klan glorification in Birth of a Nation through the thinly-veiled racial caricatures of the latest Star Wars trilogy, mainstream American film has a rather embarrassing track record concerning anything or anyone non-white.
On the surface, Traitor wants to undo Hollywood’s racial and religious tunnel vision. There’s nothing too subtle about the film’s horribly infantile ruminations on martyrdom and Islam (“Seems every religion has more than one face,” one character quips with absolute sincerity), and the script rarely differentiates between the two.
Perhaps director/scribe Jeffrey Nachmanoff (The Day After Tomorrow) and co-writer Steve Martin (yes, THE Steve Martin, Baby Mama) think they have taken one giant step in the right direction. The conversations are in place, and Don Cheadle (Ocean’s Thirteen) leads as Samir Horn, a devout Muslim and apparent terrorist who is also the film’s protagonist.
Admittedly, it’s a provocative twist, one rendered null and void by several other surprises in the hum-drum cops ‘n’ terrorists game. The traditional political crossovers and betrayals ensue – Agents! Double-agents! A mole in the FBI! – but Traitor’s predictable plot hardly registers as offensive.
And it’s not the main characters causing the biggest ripples either. Sure, Cheadle’s character is bland and lifeless to the point where we never care too much about his religion and allegiance issues. We’ve seen enough Samir Horns in past films to write him off quickly.
Guy Pearce’s (Winged Creatures) absurdly rendered Agent Roy Clayton rounds out the mindless religious discourse. As a convenient foil to Horn – the man he pursues for mixing in with some major Arab baddies – Clayton comes from a Baptist background and once trained to become a minister before deferring to the FBI.
Yes, bad movies happen to even the best actors. But the real crime here is in the overall design.
Preying on (i.e. profiting from) the sum of all American fears, Nachmanoff not only misses an important opportunity to confront his audience’s post-Sept. 11 prejudices, he adds significant fuel to the fire.
After a prison break puts Horn at the disposal of an Arab terrorist group out to fight jihad throughout the United States, we are casually introduced to a group of nameless Arab terrorists-to-be. Spread throughout the country but united in montage, they are as follows: the coffee-shop clerk, the white-collar professional, the university student and the assimilated middle-class American.
By introducing and continually returning to these four characters, Nachmanoff’s simplistic and oh-so enlightened view of the world completely shatters. Good intentions fail to explain the sudden shift in tone, and Traitor goes from empty-headed and topical to outright hostile.
The film’s hard-line message reads loud and clear: At any given point, your neighbors could become terrorists and destroy everything you hold dear.
Any way you look at it, the conclusion is greatly unsettling. The selection of the four characters appears quite deliberate and is meant to threaten a viewer from any walk of life.
It’s not just the blasé action and pre-determined plot threads leaving a bad taste. Traitor is cut from the misinformed heads of narrow-minded filmmakers whose concepts of the world seem to come from 24 rather than actual experience.
Odds are Nachmanoff and Martin only intended for the film to be another one of those half-assed breeds between sociopolitical drama and espionage thriller. What they have come out with is something far more troubling than Iron Man in black-face or the gratuitous use of the word “retard.”
zherrm@umd.edu
