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Film Review: ‘Traitor,’ 3 stars

All habitual film fans have a list of actors whom they’ll go to see even if the movie in question is outside their usual happy zone.

High atop my list is Don Cheadle, who has spent 20 years giving memorable performances in mostly small, supporting roles. While he may not crave the spotlight as many less-gifted actors do, when he does grab the lead, the results are gripping. (If you’ve never seen “Hotel Rwanda,” it’s well worth renting.)

In “Traitor,” he proves this anew as Samir Horn, son of an American mother and a Yemeni Muslim father whose car-bomb death he witnessed as a boy.

As the film opens, Horn is delivering a huge cache of explosives to a radical Muslim terrorist cell led by Omar (the superb Saïd Taghmaoui), which is planning attacks inside the U.S.

But disparate little factoids about Horn soon emerge — such as the fact that he’s a former U.S. Special Forces soldier, a veteran of Afghanistan, Bosnia and other nasty little dust-ups.

Most of this information is discovered by two FBI agents on Horn’s trail — Archer (Neal McDonough), the hardnosed type who prefers to crack skulls and take names, and Clayton (Guy Pearce), an Arabic speaker who prefers to know his enemy.

That Horn is hardly what he seems becomes clear early in the film. But to say one thing more about his identity and motivation would ruin an intricate series of twists that are unexpected, often shocking and, in one instance, morbidly funny.

Writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, working from a story he developed with Steve Martin (yes, the wild and crazy guy), wants to show that there are more facets to the “war on terrorism” than what we see in the 30-second snippets served up on the nightly news.

He’s not above lapsing into cliché; a recurring chess metaphor is worked to death, and one scene dusts off the saw about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter.

But Nachmanoff shows a sure hand in dealing with the most critical aspect of films like this: doling out and fitting together the puzzle pieces in measured, deliberate fashion, both to draw viewers into the story and allow time to develop the characters.

Given that kind of elbow room, Cheadle makes the most of it as a man at war with himself amid a much larger conflagration.

One brief scene sums up his appeal for me. It comes after Horn sets off remote-controlled bombs to blow an entire wing of a U.S. consulate in France into rubble — timing it for when no one was expected to be inside.

As he returns to the safe house to accept high-fives from his terrorist cohorts, he hears a TV report that says eight people died in the bombing — an off-schedule work crew whose presence Horn could not have foreseen.

The knowledge that he has killed innocent people sends a pang of intense anguish flashing across his face — which does not go unnoticed by his pals. But he immediately recovers by explaining that he’s disappointed the body count was so low.

It’s a short but powerful moment that highlights the nuance and subtlety that Cheadle brings to all his roles — qualities that prove particularly well-suited to a highly conflicted character like Samir Horn.

If you like your thrillers strictly black and white, you may find this film a little frustrating. But if you’re intrigued by thrillers that explore the ambiguous shades of gray tucked into the obscure corners of the bigger picture, “Traitor” delivers the goods.

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