It's so rare these days for a big Hollywood star vehicle to take on subjects as touchy as the politics of oil and the American quagmire in the Middle East that you want to give a movie like Stephen Gaghan's "Syriana" every benefit of the critical doubt.
But it's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.
Loosely based on Robert Baer's 2002 memoir, "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism," its main character is a CIA agent (George Clooney) who stumbles onto an ill-advised U.S. plot to create a regime change in a Persian Gulf emirate.
But writer-director Gaghan has made this story only one of many in a complex tapestry of individual sagas that start out with no obvious connection but very gradually come together -- in the manner of his Oscar-winning script for "Traffic."
This vast gaggle of players includes an oil-industry analyst (Matt Damon), a top Washington lawyer (Christopher Plummer), his protege (Jeffrey Wright), an oil-company executive (Chris Cooper) and a Justice Department investigator (David Clennon).
There's also a Hezbollah agent (Mark Strong), a young Arab terrorist-in-training (Mazhar Munir) and two Arab princes vying to succeed their retiring emir father -- one noble and good (Alexander Siddig), the other a greedy American toady (Akbar Kurtha).
And there's even a vast third tier of characters with significant roles in the story, including wives (Amanda Peet), fathers (William Charles Mitchell), children (Max Minghella), shady intelligence figures (William Hurt) and corrupt politicians (Tim Blake Nelson).
The drama that brings together all of these characters is a giant oil-company merger that will benefit neither the American consumer nor the people of the Middle East, and which has to be facilitated by the assassination of the region's single visionary leader.
In this year of record oil prices, oil-company profits and American casualties in Iraq, nothing, of course, could be more timely than a film that tries to lay bare some of the behind-the-scenes avarice and political expediency that has helped create the outrage.
And, in its best moments, the film makes an impressive acting vehicle for Clooney, who gives a credible and deeply sympathetic performance as a CIA agent who speaks Farsi and knows his way around the Middle East, but gradually finds he's only a clueless pawn.
Yet "Syriana" is so scattered and unnecessarily complicated that it doesn't have much impact. It fails on a basic storytelling level, never quite fully establishing its characters and forcing us to sit through scene after scene not knowing what the heck is going on.
It's also noticeably light on subtlety. The characters do not engage in dialogue so much as make speeches to one another: telling us things we already know in the manner of someone reading aloud a newspaper op-ed piece. Damon's character is especially guilty of this.
In short, this noble-minded missed opportunity cries out for the wider canvas of a miniseries and a filmmaker who could give it the satisfying structure, narrative skill and didactic clout that Otto Preminger gave "Advise & Consent" or Michael Mann gave "The Insider."