'The War Within'

A future of violence

"THERE'S THE BASTARD," an offscreen American growls as an innocent Pakistani engineer walks down a Parisian lane. Black-clad operatives leap out and tackle him, place a bag over his head, and cart him off to a prison cell in Pakistan, just in time for the first of many outsourced torture sessions. Three years later we see him smuggled into New York City by a terrorist cell – with plans to blow up Grand Central Station. The first American film to depict a suicide bomber living and working on our soil, Joseph Castelo's The War Within is a (sometimes depressingly) conventional drama, but after considering how easily its incendiary subject could have inspired agitprop and sensationalism, the film's levelheaded sanity may seem like a godsend. And after enduring the oncoming slew of post-9/11 terrorist-themed films that exploit our insecurities or offer simple answers to messy problems, we might look back at The War Within with gratitude. Cowriter-star Ayad Akhtar portrays the bomber as a wholly modern-day terrorist: buttoned-down, well educated (in America), rootless, and motivated less by religious dogmatism than quasi-misanthropy. Yet beyond suggesting that torture radicalized this once liberal man, the film doesn't fully shade in his motives and mind-set, suggesting the bomber's ultimate unknowability – and the limits on the filmmakers' talents. We're still waiting for a modern-day Dostoevsky or Conrad to anatomize the 21st-century terrorist, but this frighteningly relevant film should ease the wait. (Ihsan Amanatullah)