Review: Traitor

Don Cheadle (“Hotel Rwanda,” “Crash”) stars in a terrorism thriller that threads Sudan, Yemen, Marseille, Nice, London, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago and Halifax. Writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff (who wrote “The Day After Tomorrow”) is not retracing the international itinerary of a “Munich” or “Syriana.” The plot of “Traitor” is less about geopolitics than guilt. Devoutly Muslim, Samir (Don Cheadle) is a born-in-Sudan, raised-in-Chicago former U.S. Special Operations officer. His outward drama entails sipping tea with terrorists, bombing a U.S. consulate, loading Centex in laptops and sprinting through the steam tunnels beneath CHA projects. But his inner turmoil is the film’s focus. In a holy war with many fronts, Samir’s conscience is seared by collateral damage. FBI agent Roy (Guy Pearce from “Memento” and “L.A. Confidential”) pursues Samir across borders, increasingly unsure of his quarry’s intent. Nachmanoff’s script skimps on genre fixtures such as inter-agency jostling at Homeland Security and buddy banter between agents. Instead, the plot turns on small thoughtful symmetries: Roy comes from a line of Southern Baptist ministers and Samir’s father left behind Muslim texts prior to his death by car bomb in 1978; Roy reads Arabic and Samir dreams in English; authorities fake deaths of both martyrs and infidels for operational leverage; warfare may be called “asymmetric,” but a jihadi and a CIA contractor sound the same when they offer their justifications. Nachmanoff is deft enough to work in a handful of suicide bomber jokes. The film’s quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Koran won’t work as trailer taglines, but they score more impact than the chase scenes. “Traitor” asks what “traitor” means to a believer and a follower. With Jeff Daniels, Neal McDonough, Archie Panjabi, Aly Khan and Said Taghmaoui. 114m. (Bill Stamets)