What happened here? Rendition should’ve been one of the best movies of the year. It has a timely subject matter, a tremendously talented director Gavin Hood (whose film Tsotsi won the Best Foreign Film award a couple years ago), and three of my favorite actors (Reese Witherspoon, Peter Saarsgard, and Meryl Streep). A disappointment here would’ve been just a good, not great, movie. But Rendition is worse. This is a blase, mostly pointless film that doesn’t offer any new insight into its subject matter and even less in other areas that should be nothing but competent. It’s watchable, but come on, this should’ve been an amazing, gripping piece of work.

Director Hood tries to pack way too much into the fairly short 2-hour runtime. It feels as if he wanted to focus on the minor characters’ storylines (i.e. not the stars), but the studio execs made him also cram in a handful of characters not really pertinent to the majority of this story but are suddenly the main focus. This is true mostly in the Reese Witherspoon storyline. Her husband has been kidnapped and taken overseas to be tortured and investigated, and the husband’s scenes, while flawed, provide a lot of the tension to the movie. Witherspoon, in her worst and most forgettable performance ever, is relegated to just traipsing around, fully pregnant, sad and bewildered, screaming “Tell me my husband’s OK!!!” And I thought Legally Blonde 2 was the low point.

Then there are the other actors, only one of which truly stands out. He’s been fairly hidden in the trailers, but it’s Peter Saarsgard who makes the best impression, offering up a character who is smooth and quick on his feet but entirely realistic. Meryl Streep, on the other hand, phones in a performance (literally, in a couple scenes) playing her Devil Wears Prada character with a Southern twang. Alan Arkin walks in and yells for a couple scenes, and Jake Gyllenhaal feels so out of place that director Hood might as well cast Snoop Dogg in the role.

Rendition has a number of effective scenes, the scariest of which involves a bomb going off in the middle of a square. Car doors are shattered and bodies are shot into the air. It’s an example of a well-constructed, engrossing scene that deserves a much better movie. It’s not that anything is entirely wrong with the movie; it’s just that not a whole lot is done right. The movie chugs along, it entertains to a certain extent, it intrigues from time to time, it ends, and you think, “well, what the hell am I supposed to take away from that?” The answer is, not much.

1 1/2 stars (out of 4)