'Traitor' betrays itself

Perhaps the most bizarre bit of trivia about “Traitor,” the new Don Cheadle vehicle, is that the screen story is credited to Steve Martin. Yes, that Steve Martin ... the wild and crazy one. As both an actor and a writer, the divine Mr. M has been involved in any number of non-comic projects. But I’m pretty sure that this is his first terrorism-thriller-with-moral-subtext creation.

For most of its length, “Traitor” is a serious and suspense-filled film, which works hard to give all sides their say. But as the movie approaches its climax, the plot goes all wild and crazy. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

In a brief prologue set in 1978, an adolescent Sudanese boy sees his father blown up by a car bomb. A quick cut from his face to that of Samir (Cheadle), 30 years later, establishes his identity and helps set up his motivations.

Ironically, Samir is now an explosives expert, trained by US Special Forces. As he makes a deal to sell bomb-making materiel to a group of Yemeni terrorists, the FBI arrives, led by Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Max Archer (Neal McDonough). (Yes, the film briefly acknowledges that the FBI isn't supposed to be working internationally.) Most of the gang is killed; Samir is thrown into a Yemeni prison, where he resists Clayton’s attempts to get him to talk.

He seemingly faces a lifetime of rotting away in prison, but he strikes up a friendship with Omar (Said Taghmaoui), a chess-playing fellow terrorist, who just happens to have a breakout in the works. Once outside, Omar vouches for him to Fareed (Aly Khan), the suave Westernized second-in-command of Omar’s organization. Another irony is that, the higher up you go in the bureaucracy of these militant defenders of the faith, the less devout they seem. Samir, a foot soldier, tries not to be too offended when Fareed offers him shellfish and booze. The suggestion is that these men embrace violence in inverse proportion to the depth and authenticity of their religious beliefs.

Samir, we learn, moved to the US as a boy, which explains not only how he could have been trained as an American Special Forces op, but also his portrayer’s American accent. His know-how allows him to rise quickly in the organization and eventually he and Omar are off to Los Angeles to help assemble a nationwide Thanksgiving spectacle considerably more incendiary than the Macy’s Parade.

To discuss “Traitor” in any depth without spoilers requires a degree of camouflage and contortion that would probably leave me looking like a herbiferous pretzel. In fact, merely to discuss the extent to which spoilers are possible requires potential spoilers. I will try my best to err on the side of caution, with the one really blatant violation omitted from our print edition and only appearing online, quarantined behind a clickable url.

There is a sensible general rule that if a movie’s trailer reveals a plot point, it is fair game for journalists to discuss it openly. Indeed, the ads and trailers for “Traitor” make it quite clear that Samir is a double agent, infiltrating the terrorists on behalf of the US government or at least some secret operations team within the government.

And yet there are hints that the filmmakers intended us to believe for much of the movie that Samir might be a genuine terrorist. The big reveal, where we see who he’s working for, occurs exactly halfway through. The only reason to delay it that long is if there’s supposed to be some doubt; if that was the intent, the ads have neutralized it.

And the ads aren’t spoiling much: Come on. This is Don Cheadle — Mr. Likable. (Yes, I remember that his breakthrough performance was as the really terrifying Mouse in “Devil with a Blue Dress”; that was then, this is now.) And he’s the star of the film, our identification locus throughout. Once or twice there are references to the possibility that Samir has gone rogue or switched sides, but they’re not convincing.

More to the point, Samir’s inner conflicts aren’t really interesting or meaningful unless he’s a mole, so it’s kind of silly to act as if his status is a mystery other than briefly. The basic setup — deep cover agent faces moral confusion after bonding with his targets or seeing some of their perspective — is hardly new. Just off the top of my head, there’s “City on Fire,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “Hard Boiled,” “Infernal Affairs” and “The Departed.” There are even slight traces of it in the granddaddy of those films, Raoul Walsh’s “White Heat,” although, in that case, it’s the audience — more than undercover cop Edmond O’Brien — that begins to have some feelings for mad dog James Cagney.

Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff does a great job keeping Samir’s character in jeopardy, while dealing with the moral differences and equivalences between Us and Them in the War on Terror. But, as in his screenplay for “The Day After Tomorrow,” he isn’t so great at the plot details. That 2004 eco-apocalypse adventure was goofy enough in tone that the more ridiculous story points simply added to the fun, even if they were irritating.

But “Traitor” is working on a way more serious plane, so “adding to the fun” isn’t really an option. Some of the plot lapses fall within the conventions of thrillers: Why would the characters do something in ways more elaborate — and thus likelier to fail — than are necessary? Exactly how does Samir know another character’s secure email address at just the right moment?

I’m not crazy about those examples, but they are dwarfed by another, so monumental and so crucial that I don’t know how they thought we wouldn’t notice. They came up with a terrifically clever twist for the climax; unfortunately, it completely contradicts the setup. To have it make sense would have required a minor modification in the setup that they were apparently unwilling to make. If you’ve already seen the film or have no intention of seeing it, click here for specifics. This plot gaffe doesn’t completely invalidate what has gone before, but it certainly undercuts the film on many levels. After many right decisions throughout and solid work from the actors, it’s a shame to see the film implode at the very end.