Starring : Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Neil McDonough, Alyy Khan and Jeff Daniels.

The screenplay is written by the director Jeffrey Nachmanoff – who seems to make a film every 7 or 8 years, with the highlights here being the solid performances by the cast and the striking cinematography by J. Michael Muro.

Samir Horn (Cheadle) is an American citizen and devout Muslim who is an expert at manufacturing bombs and explosives due to being a former highly trained officer of Special Operations in the United States. He uses his talents by selling these weapons of destruction to Jihadi radicals. One of these meetings is raided by the FBI and Samir finds himself in a Yemen jail locked up with a myriad of terrorists.

Omar (Taghmaoui) comes to the aid of Samir whilst in prison and the two men begin a friendship which leads to an escape for both of them. They relocate in France and Samir is introduced to an elite terrorist group who plan to execute an astronomical attack on the United States by bombing 50 buses simultaneously – one in each state… while trying to avoid the attention of persistent FBI agents Roy Clayton (Pearce) and Max Archer (McDonough) who are hot in pursuit.

This film is a mixture of action, drama and spy thriller. Although this sounds exciting on paper the transfer onto celluloid is good but nothing more. It often suffers in the dialogue department with Nachmanoff not writing the conversation with anything new – we have heard the words all too often. However Steve Martin in his story is definitely displaying a strong message in this film – there are Muslims who believe Al-Qaeda and their subsidiaries use them for their faith.

The main reason where the film fails to deliver though is the audience having to believe that Don Cheadle is a terrorist. If we can clearly see he is not a sadistic and intentional mass murderer of innocent people, we are continually asking the same question – why do the Islamic extremists not see this ??

SUPERIOR SCENE : The first meeting between Samir and the Jihads, see him trying to sell them six crates of semtex with custom built detonators. Well shot, edited perfectly and tense… then interrupted with action – a full scale raid by the FBI. Very competent film making.

QUALITY QUOTE : “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) quotes Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

RATING : 3 / 5 stars.