A friend brought me to see a screening of the movie “Rendition” last night at the Pacific Design Center.

The drama stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard, Reese Witherspoon, and Omar Metwally. Directed by Gavin Hood. Written by Kelley Sane.

Metwally plays an Egyptian-American who is detained after he returns from a trip to South Africa and is sent to an unnamed Arab country where he undergoes torture because he is suspected of being a terrorist.

This is not “Syrianna”. It’s a paint-by-numbers story that lavishly wastes the talents of Witherspoon and Gyllenhaal who are reduced to stone faced dumbness in a badly written script that had the audience laughing in unexpected places.

It’s the type of film that has a soundtrack of Arabic music that sounds like a 1000 bees buzzing.

It spends a lot of its time on the love story of a Muslim couple rather than an on the central story of a wife whose husband has been stolen from her without a word. It has subtitles that might read , “Omar, for the sake of our child Fatima, go to the boy’s house to make peace. This I beg of you!”

Witherspoon and her struggle to free her husband mostly considers of her pleas to Senatorial aide Saarsgaard, and are remarkably free of emotion. Saarsgaard sounds like he is reprising his nasal voiced role as the bi-sexual in “Kinsey”.

The producers found enough money in the budget to go to Cape Town, South Africa for a two minute opening scene, but filmed the home of the suspect in “Chicago, Illinois” somewhere in Southern California.

The fact that so much talent could be put in one bad movie, should give hope to every screenwriter working on his/her script in Starbucks across the Southland.