Never let it be said that Hollywood doesn’t respond to the free market. For several years after 9/11, and especially after the invasion of Iraq, the movie business busied itself making exactly the sort of films you’d expect from an industry where Sean Penn passes for a moderate. There were anti-war polemics, paranoid thrillers about conspiracies in high places, and gritty, “realistic” films about terrorism and American foreign policy in which the military-industrial complex usually ended up painted in darker hues than the terrorists themselves. Occasionally these movies were good (usually when they were deliberately fantastical, as with Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne cycle), but more often they were hectoring and dreadful. Inevitably, audiences stayed away in droves, while thumbsucking critics lamented the fact that moviegoers just didn’t want to confront the realities of war — a pattern that culminated in last autumn’s box-office slaughter, when Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Lions for Lambs earned, I believe, $107.50 at the box office between them.

So finally, finally, the movie industry began turning out a different sort of War on Terror movie — a less left-wing variant on the genre, aimed at a middle ground between Jason Bourne and John Rambo, between anti-Americanism and jingoism. Call it the liberal-internationalist action film: Last year’s Kingdom was the first entrant in the genre, and it’s since been joined by Traitor, with Don Cheadle as an American Muslim deep undercover in a terror cell, and now by the glossy, globetrotting Body of Lies, which is based on a novel by the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (a noted liberal internationalist, naturally), and which underwhelms in every respect save for the talent involved in making it.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe headline the film, playing a CIA agent and his Langley handler, respectively, with Ridley Scott supervising them from the director’s chair. DiCaprio’s Roger Ferris is a tanned and bearded Arabist, capable of blending into a teeming Baghdad marketplace and romancing a lovely Persian nurse, but indefatigable in his pursuit of Al-Saleem (Alon Abutbul), a terrorist mastermind responsible for a string of European bombings. Crowe’s Ed Hoffman is a pudgy, pasty unilateralist who watches over Ferris via the footage beamed into Virginia from satellites and Predators, and orders hits and betrayals via his earpiece while ferrying his kids to soccer games. He’s the Ugly American with too much technology and not enough perspective, and Crowe masks his good looks and plays up the schlub factor, as he did in last year’s American Gangster, another Scott production. (If you ask me, Crowe is getting a little too comfortable with his “gotta get in character” beer bellies — maybe he should play an athlete next.)

Ridley Scott is a peculiar figure: He’s responsible for two of the flat-out greatest movies of the last 30 years (Alien and Blade Runner) and a slew of second-tier successes, yet he’s a difficult filmmaker for anyone to really like. There are Scott admirers (a group in which I count myself), but precious few outright fans — neither the auteur crowd nor the fanboy world throws that much love his way. Too many of his films are watchable but impersonal: If he had more idiosyncratic failures — and his best film, Blade Runner, was judged exactly that way upon its release — I suspect his successes would be held in higher esteem. Instead, his unsuccessful movies invariably feature impressive craftsmanship, but leave you wondering about the why: What’s the point of this movie? What’s it trying to say? Why were so many millions shelled out to make it?

American Gangster suffered from this problem; Body of Lies is more or less done in by it. The movie is handsome enough — even the refugee camps look picturesque — and the story zips along: You won’t be bored, and Mark Strong’s sterling turn as Hani, the debonair and deadly head of Jordanian intelligence, in and of itself makes the film at least worth Netflixing. But the movie lacks the confidence it needs to be a straightforward bang-pow actioner, and it lacks the political depth it needs to be something more than that. The result is a middling thriller that gestures ineffectively at bigger issues — by making Crowe’s handler dogmatically wrong about absolutely everything (like Bush! or Rumsfeld!); by having the terrorist mastermind declaim “welcome to Guantanamo” just before his thugs start torturing DiCaprio; and — unforgivably — by using four lines from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” as its epigraph: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Auden was writing, of course, about the Nazis. He later grew ashamed of the poem, and refused most requests to include it in collections. As Alan Jacobs tells it, “the more deeply Auden contemplated the human capacity for evil, the more frivolous his explanation of Nazi aggression seemed — not because it is untrue . . . but because that is a small portion of the truth masquerading as the whole.” This is a lesson that might profitably be applied to any attempt to analyze our current enemies as well — but Ridley Scott, I think, is not the man to do it.