Ferris and Hoffman’s sparring lacks any real menace, with angry debates about field tactics broken up by jokes about Hoffman’s weight and Ferris’ love life. There are the requisite torture/chase/torture scenes that are so de rigueur in today’s terrorist-laden suspense movies, as well as a half-assed attempt to tie Hoffman’s intransigence to American foreign policy as a whole, but there’s no sense of urgency.
Yet in spite of the movie’s high-tech veneer and its top-billed stars, “Body of Lies” is depressingly inert. Hoffman keeps tabs on Ferris through sophisticated satellite thingamabobs, which recalls “Enemy of the State,” Eagle Eye,” and any other paranoid techno-thriller released in the last ten years. The two clash on most everything, especially Ferris’ insistence on working in concert with the head of Jordanian Intelligence, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong, who steals every scene possible from the two stars), whose sophisticated veneer belies what a dangerous ally he truly is. His handler, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), steers the operation from Langley.
Reminiscent of “Syriana,” we find CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the Middle East trying to track down an Islamic cleric who’s engineered a series of deadly bombings across Europe. There’s a whiff of the terribly familiar hanging over the movie. And when the movie in question is a by-the-numbers rehash of recent espionage flicks, as is the case with “Body of Lies,” Ridley Scott’s latest, the effect is doubly unsatisfactory. If you go into the theater with the expectation that everything presented onscreen is to be mistrusted, it’s going to be difficult for the filmmakers to spring any surprises. There’s an obvious problem with including the word “lies” in the title of your movie, and you can probably figure out what it is.