Blu-Ray Review: ‘Traitor’ Betrays With Exploitation Over Genuine Drama

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CHICAGO – “Traitor” walks a fine line between escapism and exploitation and essentially falls in the cracks in between, working as neither a thriller nor a topical drama. Great performances from Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, and Jeff Daniels almost make Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s film worth a rental, but the lackluster Blu-Ray presentation doesn’t help a film that already had some serious problems become more than a marginal recommendation.

The great Don Cheadle plays Samir Horn, a former U.S. Special Operations officer who appears to be involved with international terrorism. Is Samir so deep undercover than even the government has started to suspect him or has he really turned to the dark side of the war against terror? That’s the question on the mind of FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), who first stumbles across Samir during a prison escape in Yemen and then suspects his involvement in a bombing in Nice and a raid in London. All clues lead back to Samir. Clayton tracks Samir around the world trying to get the truth, while the possible traitor stays one step ahead of the law and finds himself getting deeper and deeper into a truly deadly game.

Writer/director Nachmanoff (who wrote the similarly surface-deep “The Day After Tomorrow”) has bitten off way more than he can chew with “Traitor”, a movie that tries to blend politically sensitive issues with a Bourne-esque thriller and ends up only feeling like exploitation. There are undeniably complex issues at work in “Traitor”, ones that have been more successfully turned into drama in a film like “Syriana” or escapism in a film like “The Kingdom”.

Nachmanoff makes the classic mistake of wanting to have it both ways. He peppers his script with lines that I’m sure he considers deep like “I answer to God. We all do.” The cover of “Traitor” claims that “The truth is complicated.” But Nachmanoff doesn’t have an ear for dialogue to make that statement have the depth that he thinks it does.

Dramatically blurring the line between terrorists and the people that chase them is too ambitious of a goal for a screenwriter like Nachmanoff. The thriller elements of “Traitor” work more than the melodramatic ones but even they left me with a slightly sleazy feeling. With people dying due to terrorist acts just recently in India, watching an action movie about international bombings can be a tough sell.

Anchor Bay Entertainment (the home video company handling Overture Films) does nothing to make that tough sell any easier. The video and audio on “Traitor” are average for Blu-Ray. There’s not much to complain about but not much to praise either. The best thing about the “Traitor” Blu-Ray release is the commentary track from Cheadle and Nachmanoff. With just a few minutes with Cheadle, it’s easy to see why he’s so well-liked in Hollywood.

The problem is that the commentary is the beginning and end of the special features, as the two featurettes - “Action! The Stunts And Special Effects of ‘Traitor’” and “International Espionage: An In-Depth Look at Traitor’s Exotic Locations” - run less than ten minutes combined and don’t offer much insight into the production at all. In theaters and on Blu-Ray, “Traitor” fails to deliver.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com