Traitor
3 Waffles!

Don Cheadle stars as Samir – a devout Muslim American living in Yemen and dealing explosives and explosive accessories to a terrorist group. As the group starts planning more and more high profile attacks, and Samir becomes a bigger part of their plans, they have attracted the attention of FBI Agents Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Archer (Neal McDonough), who feverishly are trying to stop them. However, Clayton is intrigued as to why Samir seems to be part of this heinous plot, especially as he learns more about his target and the man’s background.

What is Samir’s goal?

Who is he betraying?

Traitor is a more than solid thriller, but one that simmers too much, when it needs to boil. Cheadle is fantastic as the morally driven Samir, and adds a great deal of complexity and depth to the character to make the audience experience his conflicts. Writer/director Jerry Nachmanoff (based on a story he developed with Mr. Steve Martin, who should have played some sort of small role in the movie as a penance for making Cheaper By The Dozen 2) adds a wonderful faith-based reasoning and motivation for Samir’s efforts that is fascinating and makes the character much more interesting than you might think. Of course, Cheadle helps with that as well as we feel his pain as plans go wrong and he experiences a great deal of guilt for what he has done.

Nachmanoff also makes a good decision to avoid politics and the passions of today’s world to focus on the plot and the action. No one preaches. No one makes speeches. No one waives a flag in your face. Both Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly will have to find something else to gripe about. Instead, the audience just gets a challenging mystery and one of the best “Oh My God” moments of the year.

Unfortunately, the audience doesn’t get enough of those “Oh My God” moments. We get some funny moments with the dialogue, but it could have been more, and the audience definitely could use more heated or passionate exchanges between characters. Most of the time, I felt like Nachmanoff was content to focus on Cheadle’s expressions, which are great, but how many times can we look at him and see the pain? We get it.

Traitor might not quite make an Oscar push, but it is one of the better movies you will be able to see for the next few weeks.

Traitor is rated PG-13 for intense violent sequences, thematic material and brief language