Avis Metacritic

In the end, The Mauritanian is an efficient procedural that condemns the Bush-era treatment of detainees more effectively than any other recent narrative film. It’s an affecting, but nevertheless tragic, watch.

The story gains momentum as it goes, and by the end, it’s positively gripping.

Despite a powerful performance by Tahar Rahim in the title role, and despite such marquee names as Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in the supporting roles of Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, and Stu Couch, the Marine lawyer assigned to prosecute him — despite scenes of grotesque abuse that inflame the conscience — the movie lands, through no fault of its own other than timing, with a whiff of been-there, done-that.

Perhaps the biggest issue for The Mauritanian is that the screenplay by M.B Traven and Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani tries to accommodate too many protagonists.

Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.

This legal procedural remains strangely flat, despite its star power and a gripping central performance from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. An unimpeachably well-intentioned treatment of a dark chapter in American justice, it's methodical and serious-minded to a fault.

The screenplay needed more work and the film in the can a lot more editing to make The Mauritanian worthy of the talent on the set.

It’s revealed that the evidence against Salahi, who admits only to training with the formerly CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen in an al-Qaeda camp back in the early ’90s, consists of summaries of reports and confessions, which neither side is supposed to see. But instead of rising to the challenge of such potentially abstract subject matter, the film opts for clichés: file boxes, lawyer talk over fast food, the classic confrontation in a poorly lit parking lot.

If The Mauritanian is a slight cut above so many of the pious and self-flagellating political thrillers that Hollywood churned out in the years after 9/11, that’s because it doesn’t aim to exorcise America’s guilt so much as it tries to use it as a necessary step on the road towards forgiveness.

This movie is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history, with little attention paid to questions unanswered and history unresolved.