In the spy thriller Body of Lies, director Ridley Scott and company expend a great deal of energy underscoring a shocking notion:  intelligence work entails deception and spies are a mendacious lot. They take it a step further by arguing hawkish American spymasters safely ensconced in suburban Washington, like the one played by Russell Crowe, are the biggest liars of all.

Of course, anyone would appear to be unscrupulous next to Roger Ferris, one of the CIA's least cynical and most effective operatives on the ground in the Middle East. Ferris is embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio and Crowe's character, Ed Hoffman, is his immediate superior. A fluent speaker of Arabic, Ferris is an enlightened warrior with an understanding of his adversary's culture, not to mention a soft spot for their women that will get him into trouble. 

Much like T.E. Lawrence, the British military attaché portrayed by Peter O'Toole in David Lean's 1962 classic Lawrence of Arabia, Ferris puts it on the line for the region and its people as much as he does for his own country. The comparison wouldn't hold for long if a less dashing actor were in the role -- which is not unlike the hero Leo played in Blood Diamond, a man of action with ideals who decides to do some good because he’s fed up with the dirty world around him.

It breaks down completely when the two films and the filmmaking talents behind them are compared. Ridley Scott is no David Lean. He's in his element staging shootouts, missile strikes, and pulse-raising action sequences, but when it comes to expressing ideas his technique leaves something to be desired. There's just not much being said in Body of Lies, from a script by William (The Departed) Monahan based on a novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

The movie begins with a passage from a W.H. Auden poem to the effect that what goes around comes around, particularly evil. Karma notwithstanding, this isn't a film packed with provocative theories about America's behavior in the Middle East or offering a new understanding of the region's modern history along the lines of Stephen Gaghan's Syriana. It turns out to be an action thriller that could be set anywhere in the world and is almost as generic as its title.

DiCaprio and Crowe hold up their end, making the contrast between the two colleagues compelling as far as it goes. Ferris is a spook with a sensitive side who has a practical sense of how Arabs and the Islamic faithful think. He's not averse to killing, yet he is averse to doing anything that will make his job more difficult.

Double-dealing is Hoffman's modus operandi. Head of the CIA's Near East division, he's armed with a neo-con's geopolitical outlook and a Texan's cowboy twang. He's arrogant and believes in the superiority of his cause -- protecting America's self-interest -- to the degree that the end justifies the means. He doesn't believe there's such a thing as burning bridges and, thinking only about the short-term, is willing to run roughshod over those who should be our friends.

While Ferris does the dirty work on the ground, Hoffman watches from CIA headquarters using all-seeing cameras lodged in predator drones and satellites. (The one running joke in Body of Lies is how Hoffman communicates with Ferris while carrying out the duties of a suburban father and husband.)

Hoffman's duplicity and arrogance often puts Ferris in a bind. After he's injured during an operation, Hoffman takes him out of Iraq and posts him in Amman, Jordan as station chief. Their quarry is Al-Saleem, a major terrorist affiliated with Al Qaeda. Jordan's intelligence service, headed by the smooth and wily Hani (Mark Strong), is also after Al-Saleem and the degree of cooperation between the CIA and Jordanians, as well as between Hoffman and Ferris, is the movie's primary source of dramatic conflict.

SPOILER ALERT 

Thanks to Hoffman, Ferris gets expelled from Jordan, which is when he comes up with a plan to mount an elaborate decoy operation that will lure Al-Saleem out of hiding. It backfires mostly because Ferris falls for an Iranian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani) whom he meets in a clinic and his enemies use the relationship against him. Ferris would have his head handed to him, quite literally, were it not for a last-minute intervention. Apparently, not even a progressive spy with integrity can achieve anything worthwhile in such a false and mixed-up world.

Whereas Edward Zwick's polished piece of do-gooderism Blood Diamond, could conceivably dissuade a prospective groom from purchasing a "conflict stone" and Syriana makes the Middle East and geopolitics in general seem more nefarious and much less black-and-white than we Americans assume, Body of Lies has no other purpose than to entertain. A legitimate goal yet hard to achieve and sustain when the movie is as one-dimensional as Scott's last effort American Gangster, which also starred Crowe.

In Body of Lies, everyone gets left out in the cold, even the handsome, well-intentioned Ferris of Arabia.

(Released by Warner Bros. Pictures and rated "R" for strong violence including some torture and for language throughout.)