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Review:
 How
to make America the permanent bad guy and hold Al-Qaeda harmless?
That's the question posed by this brilliantly done piece of
political propaganda.
The people who did Stephen Soderbergh's “Traffic” have gotten
together to make a huge epic with a cast of hundreds, and dozens
of individual stories that come together in one big epic climax.
The question is: is it worth it?
Story A concerns the decline and fall of CIA agent Robert Baer
(George Clooney). Baer is approaching retirement age, and when we
first meet him, he's selling arms to a group of terrorists in
Teheran, Iran. It seems that he's sold one too many rocket
launchers, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.
Bryan Woodman(Matt Damon) and his wife Julie (Amanda Peet) live a
comfortable existence in Geneva, Switzerland. He works as an
analyst for a major brokerage firm. His specialty is energy
resources. The Emir of an oil-rich Arab kingdom has invited a
representative of Bryan's firm to the birthday party of the Emir
in his sumptuous palace in Spain. So Bryan takes Julie and their
two kids for a fun weekend, and oops! There's a death in the
family, so Crown Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), feeling a bit
sympathetic decides to take Bryan on as a paid adviser.
Now Prince Nasir is a forward thinking man. He knows that one of
these days the oil's going to run out, and the good citizens of
Where'sthat-istan will be where they were two hundred years ago,
dirt poor with nothing but sand. He wants freedom and democracy
for his kingdom, so he decides to kick the evil American Oil
company out, and replace it with the wonderful people from the
Chinese Communist Party's oil company.
But that's okay, because the EAOC, known as Connex, is about to
merge with smaller Killen oil company, which just got the
exclusive rights to drill for the black gold in Kazakhstan. How
did they do this? Did Killen president Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper)
do something not quite kosher? Comnex's law firm sends attorney
Bennett Holiday(Jeffrey Wright) to find out before the SEC, which
has to approve the merger can find out….and oh yeah, there's the
simple Pakistani migrant oil workers(Sahim Amed, Mazhar Munir and
some others) who lose their jobs when the Chinese take over, and
are recruited by a religious fanatic…
But that's okay, the Chinese and the fanatic are the good guys.
The evil CIA is completely under the thumb of the evil American
oil companies, who want to kill poor prince Nasir, and as we learn
from Pope's second in command Danny Dalton (Tim Blake Nelson),
corruption is the thing that makes the world a better place to
live!!!!
It all comes to a head, and the bad guys win. The ending is
supposed to be a happy denouement. This is propaganda. There's no
doubt about that. It's also very well done, there's no doubt about
that either. We've got brilliant performances from just about
everybody. This is a gilded turd. Everything's wonderful but the
script.
Eric Lurio
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