Toward the end of “The War Within,” a brown man with a Muslim name sits in a car, contemplating a bridge leading to the big city, the city where twin towers once pierced the sky. In a nasty bit of racial profiling, he’s quickly arrested by one of New Jersey’s finest, but they’ve got nothing on him, so they let him go. The irony: Hassan, the man in the car, really is up to no good.

Therein lies the power of “The War Within,” a taut tale of terrorism and the fundamentalist ties that bind: Good is in the eye of the beholder, and in this instance, Hassan earnestly believes that he is doing God’s work. He didn’t start out this way. As a Pakistani engineering student in Paris, Hassan (Ayad Akhtar in his feature film debut) is kidnapped by American intelligence officials for suspected terrorist activities and thrown in a Pakistani prison. After being tortured (in harrowing yet underplayed flashbacks), Hassan, an avowed secularist, becomes radicalized. Soon he’s heading to America, ready for a jihad. But things don’t go as planned, and he is forced to reconsider his commitment as he bonds with Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), a childhood friend, who is enjoying the good life as a doctor and family man in the Jersey burbs.

It’s a life that Hassan could easily have enjoyed himself: He studied at the University of Maryland before heading for Paris and graduate school. He’s sophisticated and possessed of a sweet nature, with a quiet, watchful manner and large, wounded hound-dog eyes. Something happened, and it changed him, and it is to the film’s credit that it doesn’t pound the viewer over the head with the wrongs done to him. This is a film that looks forward, rather than back, glancing over the shoulder every so often, just long enough to illuminate Hassan’s history: a glimpse of riotous red welts across his back; a plastic bag yanked over his face and pulled tight; a silent scream.

Too, Hassan’s transition to devout proselytizing is sketched with a light hand, with little dialogue: A fellow prisoner tells him, “The Brotherhood is here for you,” and Hassan rebuffs him: “I don’t want to have a [expletive] thing to do with your Brotherhood.” In another scene, beaten and bruised, he is handed a copy of the Koran. By the time he’s heading to the States, a stowaway on a freight ship, he is fervently devout Muslim.

Once stateside, he settles into the warm embrace of Sayeed’s home. Sayeed is a moderate, and not particularly observant, Muslim: His wife, Farida (Sarita Choudhury of “Mississippi Masala” and “Kama Sutra”), wears traditional Pakistani dress, a shalwar kameez , but they haven’t really taught their son, Ali, the rudiments of Muslim prayer. Sayeed’s sister, the beautiful Duri, dates Americans and hangs out till the wee hours. There’s an attraction between Duri and Hassan, but he can’t get over the fact that she’s been with other men.

They’re immigrants, comfortably settled into America and trying to marry the old ways with the new. A life that is at great odds with Hassan’s covert plans.

“When did you become so pious?” Sayeed asks Hassan.

“When did your forget your heritage?”

This is a quiet movie, shot in dark and murky shades, nocturnal scenes of bridges and tunnels, of dim bedrooms and dank basements where bombs are built. The duskiness serves two functions: to foster a chilling sense of growing menace and to reflect Hassan’s turmoil, his war within, as he struggles with his conscience and his faith.

Directed by Joseph Castelo, who wrote the script with Akhtar and Tom Glynn, “The War Within” never preaches. Instead, bolstered by strong performances, it teases out complex and uncomfortable questions about faith and the impact of American actions on the rest of the world. The filmmakers may not judge Hassan, but they don’t let him off the hook, either. Call it a portrait of a mild-mannered zealot, one that seeps under the skin and unsettles the nerves. — Teresa Wiltz

ROGER EBERT:

Two new movies both deal with terrorists preparing to blow themselves up in the process of murdering others and that makes them very timely right now. Paradise Now, which follows the last days of two Palestinians who are recruited and trained to cross over into Israel as human bombs, is one of these films. A woman who cares for one of these men tries to talk him out of this mission.

The other film, The War Within, tells the story of a Pakistani man who is kidnapped by western intelligence, tortured and becomes radicalized. He eventually finds himself in New York as a part of a terrorist cell.

Both films show men who believe they have a divine mission that justifies the murder of others. Both films show that there is no real response to religious zealots who believe their guidance comes directly from heaven. And both films end in essentially the same place. And both films get thumbs up from me, but they may not be playing in your area right now. So the best film I have seen on the subject is on DVD. It’s called the Terrorist, from 1999, from India and it’s available on DVD. It’s one of my great movie selections on Roger Ebert.com

RICHARD ROEPER:

Two thumbs up for me for the films that are, as you’re saying, playing in some markets of course both will be available on DVD sooner rather than later. And I liked the fact that these films explore these very touchy subjects in a very respectful manner. They humanize the terrorists but never have us sympathize with them too much. I don’t want people to think that these are pro-terrorism or they’re really trying to show the other side of things. It’s just giving you, I think, two very accurate portrayals of what terrorists go through, the mindset, and what happens in their hearts to make themselves think, “I’ll kill myself and I will kill other people.”

ROGER EBERT:

After my print review of “Paradise Now” appeared in the Sun-Times I got an e-mail from somebody who said that I was trying to humanize these animals. And I wrote back and I said, “By calling them animals you’re thinking exactly the way that they think about you.”

RICHARD ROEPER:
And that makes it way too convenient. It’s like the film we talked about - about the last days of Hitler where he’s in the bunker and you see him - you see - just to call these people monsters is too easy. Too convenient. And these films are much smarter than that.

ROGER EBERT:

We have to deal with the fact that human beings are doing these things and you can’t just give them a title that gets rid of them
RICHARD ROEPER:

Two very good films.

Two thumbs up for “THE WAR WITHIN.”

By Peter Relic

The extradition and torture of Pakistani engineer Hassan (cowriter Ayad Akhtar) sets in motion his transformation into the very thing he was not: a terrorist. While driving a cab and living in the family home of an old friend in New Jersey, Hassan follows the orders of a cell ringleader who rationalizes his own women-and-drink debauchery: “It’s good to taste the freedom that will destroy them.” This searing depiction of our seemingly endless “war on terror” hits home in every sense.

Grabbed from a Paris street by American commandos in a black SUV, a Pakistani engineering student is drugged and flown to a Karachi prison.
Three years later, he hides in a shipping container aboard a New York-bound freighter. Radicalized by the torture inflicted by his interrogators, Hassan (Ayad Akhtar) is now a suicide bomber aiming at Grand Central Station.

In highly topical “The War Within” director and co-writer Joseph Castelo dispenses with the ticking suspense of Alfred Hitchcok’s “Sabotage” (1936), where a saboteur’s bomb rips a London bus, and Edward Zwick’s “The Siege” (1998), where U.S. agents hunt Islamic terrorists in New York City. Instead the action plays across the quietly expressive face of Hassan. The internal conflict cited in the title unfolds under the roof of the Jersey City home of his childhood friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), where Hassan instills tenets of jihad in Sayeed’s young son and recalls his youthful love for Sayeed’s ravishing sister Duri (Nandana Sen).

Hassan brings news that his brother was shot in Lahore while protesting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That’s why Hassan was picked up as a suspect. Hassan’s innocent lifelong link to Sayeed will make this Pakistani-American a suspect, too. “It’s a beautiful country,” Sayeed tells Hassan upon arrival. “Nice people.” His opinion — or his son’s — may change after FBI agents pull this moderate from his home in the interests of Homeland Security. “The War Within” shows how counterterrorist tactics can backfire and create more terrorists.

The keen-eyed handheld camerawork by Lisa Rinzler matches the script for insight. A profile shot of Hassan driving a taxi catches an airliner landing in the distance beyond his window. Just as artful is her lighting at the Saints & Sinners strip club. Cell member Khalid (Charles Daniel Sandoval) picks this infidels’ venue to rendezvous with Hassan: “It’s to taste the freedom that will destroy them.” Two lurid colors split the fundamentalists from the fleshpots.

Never sensational and always thoughtful, this smart drama is ripped from the op-ed page, not the jumbo-font headlines. It’s released by the producers of such political documentaries “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Control Room,” and dramas “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” “Series 7″ and “The Guys.”

In his press notes, which include a bibliography of studies on the film’s issues, Castelo states: “I understand the reluctance to extend sympathy to those who wish to do us harm. But I am a firm believer in the necessity and the power of empathy.”
“The War Within” illuminates the current war on terror from more angles than our one-sided action thrillers.

— Bill Stamets

Immediately after 9/11–when seeing anything other than evil behind terrorism got Bill Maher and Susan Sontag lambasted–there was a limited audience in the U.S. for complex terrorists. But four years and a controversial war later, a few works are starting to hang flesh on those stick villains. In addition to Syriana and Sleeper Cell, there’s The War Within, a film about a plan to blow up New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, and Paradise Now, about Palestinian suicide bombers. Salman Rushdie has taken up the subject in his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown.

“We saw our roles as artists as touching the audience in a way beneath the hardened political rhetoric,” says Ayad Akhtar, who co-wrote and stars (in his debut lead performance) in War Within. His character, Hassan, is a Pakistani who plans, coldly, to blow himself up. But he falls in love, is touched by suffering and speaks passionately about his cause. That, Akhtar recognizes, is a treacherous balance. “As an actor, I very much approached this as a portrayal of a suicide,” he says. “As filmmakers, we always had to keep in mind that this was an act of murder.”

Perhaps because of the tricky moral ground–and the potential for bolstering stereotypes–those terrorism scripts include sympathetic Muslims as audience surrogates. In Syriana there is a reformist Arab prince; in War Within, Hassan’s childhood friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), an assimilated suburban dad, doesn’t understand why Hassan can’t leave his anger and piety back in the Old World. In its sweeping, 24-like thriller plot, Sleeper Cell depicts a wide range of extremists but also Darwyn (Michael Ealy), a devout Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates the cell and sees its members as foes of Islam.

The motives of the terrorists vary, from war atrocities to personal woes; in Rushdie’s novel a Kashmiri Muslim murders a U.S. ambassador, but it’s less a political act than payback for a personal betrayal. Often U.S. actions play a role. War Within’s Hassan is radicalized after American agents snatch him in Paris as a terrorism suspect and send him to Pakistan to be tortured.

— James Poniewozik