Sleeper Cell Superstar | Don Cheadle wrestles with his conscience while getting into gunfights in Traitor
Katey Rich, Cinema Blend | “It’s late summer, so you can’t blame Traitor for not bothering to try too hard. It’s got Don Cheadle and Jeff Daniels in it, after all, which is reasonable star power, and a hot-button plot revolving around terrorist attacks on American soil. Making Traitor something more than a disposable B-movie was possible, but at this point in the release calendar, way more effort than it was worth. If espionage thrillers are your thing, this one may just tide you over until James Bond comes back in November.”
Amy Nicholson, Boxoffice | “What’s dull about the globetrotting thriller Traitor isn’t solely Cheadle’s Oscar-seeking stiffness. It’s hard to fault him for being flat when the script is determined to reduce its people to platitude-spouting symbols who expound their philosophies in the near-identical repetitive poetry of southern preachers. Proclaims one, ‘Terrorism is theatre, and theatre is always performed for an audience.’ The only blunt voice belongs to Neal McDonough, playing a hybrid of Dick Cheney and Ted Nugent given to bumper-sticker incendiaries like ‘Arrest all the Muslims!” and “Sorry, left my Bill of Rights at home.’”
David Denby, The New Yorker | “Despite its fresh settings (it was shot in Morocco and Marseilles as well as Chicago), and its interest in how terrorists recruit and train people and talk to one another, the movie falters just when it should be at its boldest: it suggests that Cheadle’s character is trapped by his situation, and the solution that he comes up with is presented, oddly, as a moral victory when it’s actually a disaster. The filmmakers, I think, got in over their heads and couldn’t decide whether they were making an action thriller or a drama of conscience; they wound up flubbing both. Traitor, at its most ambitious, tries to dramatize the fervent sense of solidarity among radical Islamists. It also awkwardly reminds us that not all Muslims advocate violence. Yet there’s an incendiary element in the notion that seemingly ordinary American Muslims have been ‘planted’ by foreign terrorists, and are just waiting for a signal to blow themselves and other Americans to smithereens. In its blundering way, the movie spreads a little paranoia and mistrust.”
