Rendition A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - R It's 2:01 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

Anwar is a chemical engineer from Egypt. He’s married to Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), with one son and another kid about to explode out of Isabella’s belly. He’s heading home from South Africa where he was at a conference with fellow engineers. There’s an explosion in a town in north Africa, and somehow the US government folks have tied Anwar, very loosely, to the ringleader of the group that did the bombing. So, as we have heard stories like this in the news, the CIA kidnaps Anwar, ships him to an unnamed country where that country can torture, I mean interrogate him, leaving Isabella to wonder where her hubby is. The feds say he never got on the plane from South Africa, but Isabella has the credit card charges to prove it.

So, while Isabella is using her old boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) who works for a Senator (Alan Arkin), to get information about Anwar’s whereabouts, we also have another storyline of Douglas (Jake Gyllenhaal) thrown in as an observer of the torture, um, I mean questioning of Anwar, only Douglas is really a statistician (there’s a funny line where he spouts "I like pie-charts") and not cut out to see a dude stripped naked, electrocuted, drowned, and beaten, all under the watchful eye of head questioner Abasi (Igal Noar). And if that weren’t enough to contend with, Abasi’s got his own problems at home with a daughter, Fatima (Zineb Oukach), who doesn’t want to be set up for marriage because she is in love with Khalid (Mohammed Khouas), whom we eventually find out, but not surprisingly (at least not for me), is involved with a militant group.

Wow, it’s hard enough paying attention to poor Isabella having to deal with the government folks, let alone poor Douglas put in a position not really akin to his pay grade, and now I’ve got to worry about Abasi’s relationship with his daughter and the ragamuffin she is hanging out with? And yes, of course, you can figure that somehow, someway, even the Fatima and Khalid relationship, is entwined with every other storyline.

And then, if that’s not hard enough, the movie folks try to twist everything up at the end with a different look at the timeline of events that now have you trying to re-piece together exactly what happened from when the bomb exploded to Douglas getting soft.

Buried somewhere in "Rendition" is a great film that would have dealt with the reported snatching up of "terror suspects," shipping them off to somewhere else, and then questioning them, but sadly "Rendition" muddies it all with trying to get tricky with this story relating to that story relating to yet another story and somehow they sort of all tie together.

All of the actors did okay in their respective roles, but as a stalker of Reese Witherspoon I didn’t need her pregnant. Sure, it gave some sympathy to her plight, but isn’t having your husband taken away in the middle of the night sympathy enough? In the end I’m giving "Rendition" 2 ½ stars out of 5. They made the story just too complicated that for much of the film things just dragged on.

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!