HW Review: ‘Traitor’ Movie

By T. A. Moreland for HW

Loyalties can be complicated. In Traitor Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) is a Muslim American, deeply conflicted over the calls for violence among the more radical segments of his religion. 

And while he believes some of their claims as legitimate, he’s also against hurting innocent people. He nevertheless becomes a part of an extremist underground movement and is linked to a series of bombing.  FBI agent, Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) is assigned to track him down.  Traitor follows the cat and mouse game between Horn and Pearce across several continents.

 Screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff patterned Horn after a real life Muslim freedom fighter who like Horn was deeply troubled by many of his cohorts’ embrace of terrorism.  Modeling Horn after a real person gives the character a credibility so often lacking in fictional stories. Cheadle gives life to the multidimensional Horn.  Pearce, who is an Australian, is absolutely convincing as the by the book agent Clayton.

Traitor begins slowly but soon comes together in a masterful way. It shows that political ideology is never really black and white but instead varying shades of grade.  Don Cheadle said in a press interview he agreed with the comparisons between Traitor and Matt Damon’s Bourne cloak and dagger film series.  Despite the box office success of that series, Cheadle cheats Traitor by comparing the two. The Bourne series is pure entertainment, cleaver scripts loaded with action. However, Traitor is so much more.  It is philosophical and cerebral – a film you’ll find yourself discussing and thinking about long after you’ve seen it.

This is an outstanding production.  In addition to Cheadle and Pearce, Said Taghmaqui absolutely shines as Horn’s sometime mentor, sometime peer.  Mozhan Marno, the only woman with a substantive role in the film, enriches this production in a relatively small but nevertheless pivotal role as Horn’s girlfriend.

Traitor is almost 2 hours in length and is PG-13 for intense violent sequences, thematic material and brief language.