Jake Gyllenhaal was frequently quoted this week when, in an interview, he declared that he “Hates preachy message films.” No one’s going to think twice about something like that coming from Dwane “The Rock” Johnson, but from someone doing press junkets for a film raising awareness about a U.S. government practice it clearly finds abominable, it’s bound to elicit a ringing chorus of, “Say What?!?!?”. Rendition is a movie so focused on its message that it forgets to actually tell a compelling or believable story to reach that end.

Make no mistake, raising awareness of the practice of extraordinary rendition is a worthy cause. The practice, which the CIA was given license to use under Clinton, involves the handing over of criminal suspects to foreign governments without any sort of due process, or any legal involvement at all, for that matter. In the wake of September 11th, the practice was increasingly applied to terror suspects, and critics maintain that the motivation is largely to transfer these suspects to nations with no qualms about using torture as an interrogation method. Assuming the allegations are true (the administration has repeatedly denied this as the aim of the practice), only the staunchest advocates of combating terrorism “by any means necessary” would approve.

In Gavin Hood’s first film since 2005’s Academy Award winning South African drama Tsotsi, he takes dead aim at extraordinary rendition, the CIA, and all those in Congress who look the other way for fear of appearing soft on terror. And by that measure, he scores a direct hit. As far as making a compelling film, though, he is way off the mark. To be fair, the film does have a great deal going for it. Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian immigrant and chemist living in suburban bliss with his wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), his young son, and his mother, is kidnapped by the CIA and whisked away to an unspecified North African nation after a suicide bomber there kills a number of people in a public square, including the head of a CIA operations team stationed there. Running parallel to this is a story about a young girl escaping her father’s tyrannical traditionalism and her forbidden relationship with a young man; this story’s connection to the rest of the narrative is tenuous and unclear for much of the film. The setup is tense and thrilling, and Hood’s direction gives the first 20 minutes a gripping pace and a dark, foreboding tone.