A very good movie

Since this movie had a pretty good rating on IMDb and since there was a solid cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. To be honest, I’m rather surprised that this movie has mostly received some poor reviews (only 53 Metascore) since I really enjoyed the damned thing. First of all, I have to admit that I had never heard of Mohamedou Ould Slahi before but it probably allowed me to enjoy more this movie. Indeed, this lack of knowledge did allow me to appreciate the approach they chose by not showing right away if Mohamedou might be guilty or not as it remained rather ambiguous, at least, during the 1^st half. Eventually, just like the defence and the prosecution, we slowly discover that Mohamedou might not only be innocent but that the US army actually never heard had any proof against him at all even though they kept him captive for years and even tortured to him to achieve some baseless and ridiculous confessions. Of course, you might argue like many critics that it was actually nothing new but I don’t agree. Indeed, they are actually still 40 prisoners in Guantamo Bay right now and this movie displayed in a powerful way how the US, in spite of their incredible resources, waged a senseless war on terror by terrorizing 1000’s of innocent people themselves. The fact that Kabul and Afghanistan in general has just fallen back under the Taliban regime after 20 years of US occupation made this movie even more topical. At least, even if the reviews were rather harsh, everybody seemed to agree that Tahar Rahim delivered another strong performance here and the guy was indeed pretty much pitch-perfect. On the other hand, I have to admit that the other characters played by the rest of the cast (Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch and Zachary Levi) could have been more developed. Woodley was especially wasted playing a really thankless part who had basically no impact at all on the whole story. Anyway, to conclude, in the contrary to most of the critics, I really enjoyed the damned thing and I think it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.