Debbie Does the Movies 08.29.08

Midweek Box Office: "The Jerk" Makes Boring, Moral Equivalency Terrorism Flick "Traitor"

By Debbie Schlussel

Leave it to Steve Martin--yup, that Steve Martin--and a liberal Jew, Jerry Nachmanoff--to make yet another insipid, "they hijacked my religion"/"Christians are terrorists just like Muslims" movie in the mold of Rosie O'Donnell's ideology.

Now, I know why Steve Martin--who wrote and executive produced this movie--played "The Jerk." He wasn't really acting, apparently. His boring Bin Laden cinema, "Traitor", debuted in theaters, yesterday.

Posters for this awful movie say, "The truth is complicated." But, more accurately, the truth is actually very simple . . . and it's not in this movie. Silver screen sleeping pills are, though.

When I first saw the trailer for the movie, I thought it looked like a "blame-America-for-creating-the-Islamic-terrorists" flick.

It's that and more. Worse is the highly objectionable moral equivalency that swaths itself throughout this boring, sleep-inducing movie that's a bad rip off of what was a great Showtime miniseries, "Sleeper Cell."

The plot is similar: A Black undercover operative who is a devout Muslim goes deep undercover to infiltrate a terrorist cell planning an attack on America. (In this one, the Muslim is Don Cheadle.)

But that's where the similarities ends.

Whereas "Sleeper Cell" was exciting and mostly accurate from beginning to end, "Traitor" manages to make even explosions, bombs, and terrorist plots extremely dull amidst the non-stop pan-Islamist propaganda pimping throughout. I literally fell asleep several times, desperately trying to stay awake through this almost two hours of drivel.

Cheadle plays Samir Horn, a Sudanese-born son of a man mixed up in the Muslim Brotherhood. His father is blown up when he's young, and Horn is raised in Chicago by his Muslim mother who dons a hijab and looks like she walked out of Farrakhan-casting central. And yet, somehow, Horn is a moderate helping America fight terrorists? (In real life, not on this planet.) FBI agents don't know Samir is really a CIA operative on our side.

This movie is peppered with the same old, hackneyed, false narrative about Islam, which we heard from everyone including President Bush right after 9/11.

Here's a sampling of some of the moral equivalence dialogue peppered throughout this 2-hour ordeal in ennui:

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