Movie-Holic

There are those movies that you fall in love with right from the opening scene. Then there are those that you want to poke your eyes out so that you are never subjected to that kind of torture again. Body of Lies is neither one.

As stated in my earlier post about what I’m watching, I’m not a big DiCaprio fan. Just never got into stuff that he did. Anyway… I started watching Body of Lies with that frame of mind and didn’t intend to enjoy it. At least that was my intention.

Body of Lies turned out to be a pretty cool story of a CIA field operative, his superior, a Jordanian head of intelligence, and a high ranking terrorist. The intensity of the relationships between all four of these people help the movie a great deal in being a quality movie. Leonardo DiCaprio plays CIA operative Roger Ferris and Russell Crowe is his supervisor Ed Hoffman who is pretty busy taking care of his family, talking on the phone, watching real time satellite images of Ferris’ activities, and traveling back and forth from the US to Jordan. The entire time you don’t know if they actually like each other or hate each other. But, it was a cool dynamic.

Add to that mix the head of the Jordanian intelligence community and you have some pretty good character interactions and landmines that blow up in Ferris’ and Hoffman’s faces.

One thing that I was very pleased with in Body of Lies is how the story never really stopped. There just wasn’t any places in the storyline where you could lose focus as sometimes happens with CIA, or intelligence type movies. There is sometimes too much talking and analyzing that you begin to get bored with it. That doesn’t happen in Body of Lies. It is first and foremost an action movie. And there is plenty of it.

Not the big, over-the-top type of action with huge explosions, death defying stunts, and incredible fight scenes. More like, real life type stuff where the characters got hurt and stayed hurt.

Another big drawback to movies of this genre is the amount of “time-wasters” thrown into it to lengthen to run time. Body of Lies, keeps the story running the entire time without running down rabbit holes and leaving you wondering, “What was that all about?”

And yes… I have to admit… DiCaprio did a pretty good job of portraying the emotional, and physical stress, or being a CIA field operative. It just showed in him in every move his character made. On the other hand, I wasn’t that happy with Russell Crowe’s performance of Ed Hoffman. I don’t know… I just keep seeing him as a Gladiator and not a fat, balding, southern bureaucrat.

Final analysis for Body of Lies would be that, while not a phenomenal masterpiece, is a pretty good movie that would be a nice addition for your movie collection.