Film: Not So Great, Scott

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.

About the Author

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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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.