Which is to nab one highly wanted fictional terrorist who has faded off everyone's radar, because of the low-tech way how these terrorists operate. So we have an experienced, cunning management strategist, and a go-getter operations guy in what would be a dream-team pairing, if not for their fairly constant arguments because they each subscribe to different philosophies and approaches to the same problem.
But of course being far away from the action, he very much relies on his best field agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio), young, energetic, smart and with the linguistic ability of Arabic, to feed him much needed intelligence from which to formulate his strategies. Russell Crowe stars as Ed Hoffman, the head honcho of a very high tech counter-terrorism department with plenty of fanciful monitors to view events unfold thousands of miles away, and with advanced weaponry to call upon at his disposal, with a penchant for running many simultaneous side operations privately. While it does make the CIA look inept in the portrayal here, and puts the Jordanian intelligence service in much more competent light, you'd start to realize that anti-terrorism efforts do boil down to basic level human to human trust, cooperation and competence.
We have Bourne, Bond and the occasional Spy Vs Spy type of movie, but Ridley Scott, in an adaptation of David Ignatius' novel of the same name, puts a very realistic spin on this, perhaps even too close in its unflinching take on the topical events on Terrorism, as is its treatment of the intelligence warfare game that that part of the world could be engaged in right now, where the truth is an invaluable commodity that can be traded, and half truths often passing off as facts, with lies just clouding and muddling everything up. Well thankfully, the story is a lot more than that, and being a clash of ideals, personality and tactics, while still working on and for the same side, makes this a much more gripping thriller to sit through. If you'd believe the angle the trailers adopted for this movie, I guess you're more than likely to deem it an adversarial duel between DiCaprio and Crowe, with the latter being some armchair smarty-pants willing to risk it all to "save civilization" by betraying the former.
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