01L2MDT

Ridley Scott's Body of Lies offers familiar tropes, familiar ideas and goings-on in a cinematic package that is engaging because of how it has been shot and cut together and because of the performances of the actors and actresses. There is no subtext in this product and I should not have been surprised that as soon as the end credits rolled with a Guns N' Roses song, I was thinking about something else already. The most entertaining (albeit unintentional, surely) bit of the film came from an abbreviation. The rest of it was well-edited exchanges of dialogue, a tour of several terror-infested parts of the world, a specious discourse in ideology, bureaucracy, jargon (Nitrate 37 slewing to all target ports now; IR 3.9, long wave 10.7, we're right on their six) and product placement (unsubtle Nokia cellphones, ubiquitous and more appropriate EMC data storage systems, the BlackBerry). I think I'll go back and watch Blade Runner again now.