Hollywood may be comprehending that the movies with political and war subjects saturated the taste and they left the unhappiness from North American people satisfied.The ones who are already convinced do not need any more; and the ones which match with the aggressive foreign policy from the United States will not stop supporting the "pro-America" practices.However, that has not stopped many filmmakers from looking for new material; in other words, they are more interested to focus on the peripheral aspects of war, instead than focusing on the war itself.
So, we have seen movies like In the Valley of Elah and Stop Loss, which offer discouraging visions of the soldiers who came back from war; movies like Lions for Lambs, Rendition and Syriana, which examine the ideology behind the conflicts; and finally, movies which could belong to the action genre if it was not because of their political message, like The Kingdom and Body of Lies.But we had never seen the conflict from the enemy's point of view, and because of that, Traitor is a refreshing and fascinating portrait of the causes which motivate the rebellion and disgust against the North American expansion.
The screenplay from this movie has unsuspected levels of intellectual and emotional provocation.Screenwriters Jeffrey Nachmanoff (who is also the director from this movie) and Steve Martin (the famous comedian) refuse to bring us easy answers about the ideological conflicts, and they portrait a discouraging vision of international politic, where concepts like "loyalty" and "treason" are neither good or bad, but only useful tools for manipulating opinions, public perception or legislation.
Traitor is a truly audacious movie which goes more far away from the easy complaints of patriotism and human rights which other movies make, showing us that in fact, the world works on a grey scale, and not on the simplistic "black and white" the politicians want to make us believe.
But, besides of all the ideological background from this film, Traitor work perfectly as an ambiguous and incredibly tense thriller, which has perfectly developed characters who occupy their ambiguous positions without revealing their clear porpoises, provoking a delicious suspense on the spectator, at the same time it is difficult to know where the story will take us.Nachmanoff's direction is sober, something which works very well on the context from this movie.The performances are excellent, not only the one from the great Don Cheadle, but also the ones from the supporting cast, where the members who mostly stand out are Saïd Taghmaoui as a terrorist and Jeff Daniels as a security contractor, which is a role where this underrated actor shows his wide range, which goes more far away than the family films where we usually see him.The only fail I found on this movie is that the ending could have been a little more polished.But, in spite of that, I recommend Traitor with a lot of enthusiasm, because it is an excellent movie which does not only entertain very much, but which also leaves the spectator thinking.