Rendition starts out with an interesting concept. A man born in Egypt, who's been living in US since he was 14 and is married to an American woman with a son and another child on the way, is swept up by CIA in the aftermaths of a terror attack in a Middle East country. Without any proof against, lawyer to help him or any rights at all, they use the new rules created on the back of September 11th to imprison him and rendition him out of the country for torture.
The moral issues of torture is one aspect of this movie, much like in the recently reviewed new movie Unthinkable. There's also the aspect of the free leech given government agencies thanks to the fear created by terror. Spending the phrase 'national security' or 'suspected terrorist', and they can pretty much do as they please. A carte blanche to forget about civil rights. Both things interesting enough on their own baked into a political thriller, but the real kicker her in my eyes is the American woman married to this guy renditioned. Her husband just disappears, and no-one has answers for her, or at least no-one wants to answer her questions.
Reese Witherspoon plays this woman very well, and also Jake Gyllenhall, Meryl Streep, Omar Metwally and the rest of the cast does well. Sadly the focus of the movie is somewhat unfocused. There's another story we follow at the same time, about the daughter of the torturer in this Middle East country, we follow the American CIA agent there as well and so on. It's not a well enough crafted script to keep in mind what they are trying to tell. I wished they had stuck to Witherspoon's character and crafted it around her, cause there's a story dying to be told well. As they spun it, I'm only left pondering of what could have been. I hate that feeling.
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