Really Surprised!

Beautiful, moving film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) is a Sudanese-American devout Muslim. He's trying to sell Semtex explosives to Omar (Saïd Taghmaoui) in Yemen. They are arrested by the local military. FBI agents Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Max Archer (Neal McDonough) try to recruit Samir but he rejects them. They start zeroing in on him as a terrorist. In prison, he stands up to a vicious criminal in defense of a weak prisoner. Omar accepts the pious former American soldier Samir into his group. They break out of prison and work towards a coordinated attack in America with sleeper cells. Suddenly, it's revealed that Samir is working with Carter (Jeff Daniels) from US Intelligence deep undercover without anybody's knowledge.Don Cheadle makes this compelling by his will of personality. The story is much less compelling. It reveals the twist quite early. Frankly, I was wondering if there is going to be another twist where Samir actually turns out to be a real terrorist. By doing the reveal, the FBI story is defanged. It would have been better to stay on Cheadle throughout the entire movie.

I found this film very Hollywood in it's address to Islamic radicals and terrorism. Though at least they did manage get to some facts correct as regards to Islam.Most interesting fact that I found in the film was Taqiyya and Kitman (lying). " you must blend in " The 9/11 hijackers practised deception by going into bars and drinking alcohol,thus throwing off potential suspicion that they were fundamentalists plotting jihad.This is a film for the mature audience,and it did leave an after taste in my mind that asks me to think twice about what and who 'the person/s next door' is really about,in that respect the film is very dark !8/10

It does live up to its billing of a tense high octane thriller at least initially but the lack of conviction to take sides even while dealing with a convinced protagonist hurts during many potentially flourishing moments. The movie slowly succumbs to a B-Movie feel in the second half though Cheadle gives a top performance.Samir (Don Cheadle) is affected by West's act of aggression when he was young. He builds his life systematically to avenge his loss. An FBI agent Roy (Guy Pearce) puts pieces together of certain international events and zeros in on Samir. How Samir evades him and tries to carry his mission with a moral dilemma holding him back comprises the rest.It boasts of an excellent screenplay initially carefully revealing pieces of a larger puzzle like any good thriller would. Unfortunately runs out of steam very soon making it a generic cat and mouse chase. Don Cheadle expectedly gives a humble yet powerful performance while Guy Pierce and his colleague resorts to a caricature of FBI agents what we have seen in many other flicks. Since a similar story is handled in so many ways in the recent times, it required something spectacular to standout but comes very short of what was required. Lacking these powerful moments makes the runtime longer than it already is. The moral dilemma and the perspective of West and East towards each other was portrayed promisingly at the start but gets repetitive and dragging at a certain point.It never had the potential to hit big, but couldn't restrain to a simple smart thriller either

Okay, so now we know not all Muslims are devils - well, only stupid ignorant people thought (and still think) that in the first place.This film was all over the place - literally - many locations, quick cuts, exotic places, all felt real.That's about it.It lost my interest as soon as it was clear that the lead character was a mole - then it was just another film about a mole, and boring at that.Maybe I've watched too many films to get excited over this one.Maybe it's because I'm not American, yeah yeah, the government can and will protect its people (except for the bus driver...), a little too propaganda-ish for my taste.I found myself wanting to see a film about the bombers, they seemed like ordinary nice people, why would they want to do a thing like that.And sure, the terrorist gang leaders would employ a former special agent - haha And sure, the FBI agent would type the NAME of a most wanted person as a reply to an e-mail with vital information - and the terrorists didn't intercept THAT...they had access to everything else. And sure, it's so easy to knock out strong men with one blow to the head....and the only way to meet a girlfriend is in a public place....I will stop here, of course there are faults in every movie, but this one wanted to be smart, well, it wasn't.I agree with the one thing: That it's not about religion. There is good and bad in every 'holy' book, and there is good and bad in people. Books don't kill people.