When did you last see my husband? ... Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard in Rendition. Photograph: New Line/Everett/Rex Features
A number of American critics have come down hard on Rendition, a film about an Egyptian-American who is snatched by the CIA, flown to an unspecified North African country (although it's obviously Morocco) and tortured. "Turgid, obvious melodrama," was the verdict from the MSNBC film critic, Alonso Duralde, while AS Hamrah at the Phoenix was equally scathing: "Rendition is not a good movie. It's more a globalised banality product, extruded, character-stuffed, and shipped through many lands."
I beg to differ. I was pleasantly surprised by this Hollywood take on one of the nastier side effects of the "war on terror," which stars Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal. OK, there was a formulaic happy ending, but the film also managed to combine the engrossing aspects of a thriller with valid questions about the morality - and effectiveness - of torture. The story it tells is not dissimilar to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian who was the victim of "extraordinary rendition" in 2002.
Meryl Streep was fun to watch as a US intelligence officer, but the strongest story line - complete with some excellent performances - came courtesy of a North African subplot about the daughter of a local intelligence boss who falls in love with a suicide bomber who is attempting to kill her father. Throw in an Amores Perros-type twist and the result was a pretty decent film.
The screening I attended was arranged by Reprieve, the civil rights group that represents prisoners denied due process, and whose patrons include Alan Bennett, Lastminute.com co-founder Martha Lane Fox and the wonderful BBC broadcaster Sir Charles Wheeler. According to Reprieve, citing a US official, up to 80,000 people have been secretly detained since 2001, many of whom have been "rendered".
Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve, watched the film as a legal expert and challenged us beforehand to spot the inaccuracies. His final verdict was that Rendition was actually impressively accurate, although he did spot one mistake. In real life, he said, US intelligence agents would never have been in a room where torture was taking place. They would have watched through a two-way mirror.
