Jessica Chastain spends two hours and forty minutes doing her best Clarice Starling (and a bit of Agent Scully) impersonation with a bin Laden stand-in standing in for Hannibal.
Review:
This is a film that's trying to be three films at once:
1) one-third of a seventh-rate female Jack Ryan knockoff political thriller written by James Patterson's retarded, inbred second cousin,
2) one-third painfully overt torture porn/morality tale (think Oliver Stone obvious), and
3) one-third action movie for which you already know the ending.
The problem is that each of these segments, taken alone, is merely average. Stitching them together sure as hell doesn't make them any better.
The way the American agents are depicted damn near makes you root for the various brown people they're questioning. The notion that reliable intelligence can be gathered using the methods shown in this movie is laughable. How laughable? I quote a superior movie:
Nice Guy Eddie (Christopher Penn): If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don't necessarily make it fucking so!
It drags on way, way, way too long. At some point in the film, some shit goes down that makes the protagonist say, "I'm going to kill bin Laden." Things could have started from there, and the forty-five minutes up that point could've been encapsulated in a Star Wars-style paragraph scroll. You eliminate much of the torture porn if that happens. If I want that, I have the entire Saw franchise and the Mel Gibson's Jesus Gets Graphically Beaten and Crucified to get my fix. I will say it was rather funny when they focused in on a recording of B. Rock saying that the US won't use enhanced interrogation techniques.
Verdict:
It's not just one mediocre/heavy-handed movie, it's three.