There's an interesting thesis to be written about how politically charged movies, especially those about war, need distance from actual events to be effectively powerful. It took years for Oliver Stone to make Platoon and fully address the horrors of the Vietnam War and Letters From Iwo Jima, one of the best World War II movies, came out in just the last fifteen months. But our current nightmare in the Middle East has become the focus of numerous films recently and most (arguably all) of them have failed.

One of the most notable missteps is Gavin Hood's Rendition, a film that has its heart and its politics in the right place and features a stunning ensemble, but its intentions only get it so far. Rendition tries to take complicated, evolving issues about torture and information and turn them into a riveting thriller, but the real-life situations that it recreates continue to change with every nightly newscast. As if the shifting landscape of the Middle East weren't enough, with films like Taxi to the Dark Side and No End in Sight earning worldwide acclaim, why watch actors recreate the horrors we can see for ourselves? It makes the dramatic bar that they have to hurdle more interesting than the nightly news, and raises it that much higher. It makes a movie like Rendition feel like a film that should have been made a decade from now, commenting on what happened by looking back at the complexities instead of trying to make entertainment from current events.

Rendition tells the true story of a man who disappears after a flight from South Africa to Washington DC. His disappearance was at the hands of the US government, who are trying to get to the bottom of an assassination attempt and explosion in the Middle East. The grieving wife (Reese Witherspoon) will do anything to get her husband back and she begins a search that leads to high levels of government and people who believe information should be obtained by any means necessary, even if the source of that information has to be tortured close to death to get it. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a novice in the torture room while Peter Sarsgaard plays a CIA unit head pushing buttons in DC. Alan Arkin, Meryl Streep, and JK Simmons co-star.

You can't dismiss the intentions of Rendition or the undeniable talents of one of the best on-paper ensembles of 2007, but the movie never feels like anything more than a product of Hollywood. Witherspoon, in particular, feels miscast and underused and Arkin and Streep have near-cameos. Gyllenhaal, who's the actual lead of the film, comes out unscathed, but Rendition borders on exploitation, turning issues of racial profiling and torture into a "gripping thriller." These are serious times and it takes very skilled writers and directors to be able to deftly turn the issues of the day into narrative film. Maybe it's just too early for Rendition. Maybe it was a film that would have never worked. We'll never know.

We can know more about the making of Rendition with a detailed collection of special features on the New Line DVD, including a commentary with director Gavin Hood, a documentary about the making of the film, and a featurette. Rendition also marks one of New Line's best recent technical video transfers. The audio is good and the video transfer is great, with near-HD quality on the standard release. Like a lot of the Iraq based movies of 2007, Rendition looks great, but what the movie says and does below that Hollywood sheen is what falls flat.