Rendition: Boring, flat, stiff

Most of all the large film festivals have added a new genre of film.

There are the old standbys like comedy, drama, action, thriller and so on, but now there's the 9-11 subject and its subgenres. The 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, for example, asks you to choose from one of 10 subgenres: terrorism, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, torture, Bush, and you can guess the rest. I assume it's getting hard to wade through earnest but weak films.

"Rendition," which stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard and Alan Arkin, is a very earnest but very weak film.

Terms like flat, misfire, slow, stiff, poor direction and boring come to mind. Now consider that those words are describing an action flick that travels from Chicago, to Washington, D.C., to South Africa, to the Middle East, where there are terrorists plots, explosions, scenes of torture and political intrigue.

If you were to ask me what's wrong with the film, I don't know if I could tell you.

Reese Witherspoon is a loving wife with one young child and one on the way. Her seemingly happy life (there's no back story for us to decide) crashes around her when out of the blue her Egyptian-born husband doesn't get off his plane in Chicago. In fact, his name has been removed from the passenger list.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East a terrorist group with Egyptian ties has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb that has "accidentally" killed a CIA agent. With Reese's husband flying home from South Africa that same day, the CIA decides to pull him out for questioning. When he doesn't (can't) cooperate, they put him on a plane to a secret detention facility outside the U.S. for "unorthodox" (read: torture) interrogation.

Back in the Middle East, at the scene of the attack, an agent who barely escaped the bombing (Gyllenhaal) is now in charge of overseeing the interrogation, and since he's spent his career behind a desk, the torture techniques (specifically water boarding and electric shock) start to weigh on his soul.

Will Witherspoon get someone in the government to give her an answer about her husband?

Will the husband crack under torture?

Will Gyllenhaal buck the system and do the right thing?

And what are we going to do about these terrible Muslims?

I guess if I discussed each uninspired role or each cookie-cutter subplot, I might be able to give you a better reason for the failure of "Rendition." I do, though, have a feeling that the director and producers felt the topical storyline alone would justify rolling the cameras. They had an A-list cast and a story ripped straight out of the headlines.

What could go wrong?