I don’t have a great track record when heading to the movies with my mates in Glasgow.  The films I choose, may be film of the year and win Oscars for everything, but they get slated off my hard to please – short attention spanned – Weegie pals!

With a choice of many, I declined and hoped someone else would take the lead.  We ended up seeing Body of Lies.  Seeing a film without hearing anything about it can be a blessing.  You don’t have any baggage or misconceptions, but sometimes you don’t really know what to expect and can spend too much time working out your opinion.

This was a really interesting film, which must have had enough action to keep certain pals interested, but also enough meaningful stuff to keep my other pals happy!  The 128 minutes (allegedly) flies by.  The final 5 or so almost bringing me to thrown up, quite unexpected that!  Never really been a big fan of Leo, but he is actually pretty decent in this.  Quite a subject to tackle, terrorism, Iraq, insurgents… but I think it is done in a fairly balanced way, with the CIA giving as good as they get with regard to torture and bombings… There is an attempt to introduce the wheelings and dealings and complications of international relations, but there is room for more here, we are not all ignorant…

Russell Crowe comes across as overweight and annoying, guess he played his part well then?  The winner for me was Mark Strong who was suave and sophisticated, humourous and just great!  As with most Leo films there was the woman to keep him going, I guess this added a “human” element to all the military machinery… but not really essential to the story.