Incredibly naive. The epitome of both sidesism, that ultimately one or two good men in the FBI can wrangle the system back into control from the big bad military and CIA. That they’d care about illegal detainments and torture and execution of Arab American citizens. There’s interesting ideas about the friction between departments in a machine as big as the American government, and the consequences of interventionism, but it outstrips the movie’s ability to really tackle them. And the third act twist undercuts its desperate attempts to assure you it’s not Islamophobic, promise!

It’s kept afloat by a really solid cast. Washington, Shaloub, Bening, and Willis deliver as the leads, as expected, but you never hear of these roles as iconic ones of theirs for a reason. It plays to their strengths but never asks more of them. Washington can monologue like no one else, Shaloub gets to show some edge, Bening is eccentric and hard to pin down, and Willis is believable as an implacable military man. The supporting cast is made of solid hands like Reddick and Proval. Proval gets a pretty good laugh through mostly his delivery of ‘The dog works for the CIA?’ And Reddick stands right beside Washington as an equal while not diverting attention from the lead, not an easy task. They make the film watchable. But they can’t save it from its clumsy mess.