Release Date: August 27, 2008
Rating: PG-13 (for intense violent sequences, thematic material and brief language)
Genre: Drama
Run Time: 112 min.
Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Actors: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Neal McDonough, Jeff Daniels, Said Taghmaoui, Archie Panjabi
A story about Islamic terrorists infiltrated by a Muslim explosives expert with ties to the West,
Traitor manages to be unsatisfying as a thriller, dreary as a thought piece, and somewhat offensive in the amount of screen time it spends as a terrorist apologia.
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Don Cheadle stars as Samir Horn, a devout Muslim and special ops agent for the United States who’s now closely tied to a group of international terrorists. Drawn to the group through his friendship with Omar (Said Taghmaoui), a jihadist he meets while in prison in Yemen, Samir finds a commonality with men who will stop at nothing to defeat their enemies.
After a spectacular attack on the U.S. consulate in Nice and London, Horn, who speaks excellent English and can pass unnoticed in the United States, is tapped to orchestrate another attack in the American Midwest. Trying to stop him is FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce, putting on a passable Southern accent), son and grandson of Baptist preachers, who thinks he might have some insight into the Horn’s motives. Another agent, Max Archer (Neal McDonough), is less interested in motives and more in cracking skulls.
Motive is also the primary interest of director and writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who goes to great lengths to lay out the case for jihadism against the West. Shots of devout Islamic prayer share screen time with expressed rationales for suicide bombings (“you must be willing to sacrifice some of your pawns to win the game”; “a man who is not afraid to die can never be defeated”), moral equivalency with other religions (“every religion has more than one face”), and comparisons between the Ku Klux Klan and Christendom.
Horn is not so easy to pin down. Working with a shady Western official (Jeff Daniels, underused), he’s taken further than he wants to go in a plot that results in the death of innocents. The incident forces Horn to wrestle with how he can be a faithful Muslim while trying to keep some distance from religious extremism.
Such a flattering portrayal of the internal struggles of religious belief is unusual in mainstream Hollywood films. (Christian audiences can think back on Amazing Grace as one of few recent films that dared attempt a thoughtful examination of Christian convictions and how to live them out in one’s vocation.) The problem with Traitor is that Nachmanoff writes in too many characters, while gamely trying to cover the film’s inadequacies by racing around the globe, hoping to distract viewers with several shots of skylines in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.