Body of Lies
This is classic tale in three acts.
Act 1: The Fall
Protagonist leads a CIA operation to hunt down terrorists. His handler in the US is a control freak that is show always taking his kids to school, soccer practice et al.. Said handler botches a HUMINT operation due to inflated egos and dick-measuring contests between the US and their local partners. Protagonist finds a love interest. Protagonist gets kicked from the country.
Act 2: The Comeback
Protagonist and Handler (which hate each other) go rogue and come up with plan to keep their jobs. Protagonist frames innocent Muslim for staged terrorist attacks as a sting operation to get the leader of Ersatz ISIS. US partners ask Protagonist to return to the country to try neutralise this new fake threat. Protagonist returns to love interest in the clear like he was regular person and not a spy. Badguys kill the innocent bait and kidnap the love interest.
Act 3: The Resolution
Protagonists begs partners for help, gets shrugged since he was running fake terrorist attacks on their soil. Protagonist goes at it alone, rampaging through their base but he is snatched before finding the love interest. The cavalry arrives on time, defeats the badguys and gets the girl. Turns out the US partners were playing n-dimensional chess, the girl was not really kidnapped and the Protagonist was the bait.
Could almost be great, but after that ending, it’s only above average.
Ridley Scott should stick to this kind of film, instead of trying to retroactive ruin all the good Aliens.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.