The title alludes to the U.S. policy of "extraordinary rendition" (hatched under the Clinton administration, we're informed, just to dirty the hands on both sides of the aisle, but not abused until the Bush administration), which allows for terror suspects to be whisked away in secrecy, without due process, to foreign prisons for intensive interrogation. Translation: torture. The suspect so whisked away here is an Egyptian-American chemical engineer, a respected academic of long standing, who is unfortunate to be travelling back to Chicago from Cape Town (homeland of the director, Tsotsi's Gavin Hood) in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in an unnamed North African country (very credibly staged, this bombing, not overly prolonged nor gruesomely detailed), and unfortunate again to have received cellphone calls from a phone number once linked to one of the known terrorists. Hence, a hood is thrown over his head at O'Hare and only comes off, along with all his clothes, in a dungeon in North Africa. The receipt of all those cellphone calls is never adequately explained, and is not even nurtured as an area of ambiguity. That might have inhibited the filmmakers' righteousness. Concealed in the tangle of plot threads is a trick of time whereby we go through most of the movie, and well into the furiously cross-cutting climax, without realizing we have been straddling two distinct time zones. (It's fair play to give away the trick to that extent because frankly it's a cheap trick.) The movie ostensibly wants you to think deeply, and yet it also wants to blow your mind, fake you out, wow you, in the way of the trendy one-upmanship potboiler. These two mind states do not sit comfortably together. The going-through-the-motions surprise twist adds nothing in substance and adds a lot in frivolity. With Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin, Meryl Streep, and Igal Naor. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd