Samir Horn (Don Cheadle, right) gets on the wrong side of FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) in the political thriller Traitor. (Rafy/Overture Films/Alliance Films)

As Don Cheadle has said many times in both print and film, Darfur changed his life. The continuing genocide in western Sudan – which has led to at least 300,000 deaths – has spurred the actor to impassioned political activism. It has also spurred him to greater seriousness in his film choices, which have included Hotel Rwanda, the race drama Crash, the post-9/11 meditation Reign Over Me and Talk to Me, in which he played talk-radio host and political activist Petey Greene. (We’ll ignore Ocean's Thirteen – even the most high-minded thesp needs a break.)

Traitor, Cheadle’s latest, is not specifically about Darfur, but his character, Samir Horn, is half-Sudanese and half-American, and the film is in its own pulse-pounding way about the perversions of faith that have contributed to the Sudanese conflict.

A quick, sun-drenched flashback sets the tone. In Sudan in 1978, an adolescent Samir watches his beloved father, a devout member of the Muslim Brotherhood, get blown up. Raised by his widowed mother on the mean streets of Chicago, Samir becomes a Green Beret and fights alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Skip to the present. Samir is now a mercenary, selling munitions to the highest bidder. In Yemen, he’s busted unloading a truckload of bomb detonators to an al Qaeda-like cell. After rebuffing the interrogation efforts of a straight-shooting FBI agent named Clayton (Guy Pearce, sporting a deft, Clintonian accent), Samir is thrown into prison along with his potential customers. Initially wary of the Muslim American, his fellow captives are soon impressed by his resolute religiosity and adopt them as one of their own.

Samir and co. don’t stay imprisoned for long. After escaping, they quickly make their way to Marseilles and then London, where they hatch a series of increasingly destructive plots. When one of Samir’s bombs takes out the American consulate in Nice, killing eight people, his barely disguised horror at the loss of innocent life suggests that he might not be the jihadist he appears. Nonetheless, the terrorists concoct a plan to simultaneously place 50 suicide bombers on buses all across the United States.

Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff isn’t really interested in keeping Samir’s secret for long — once it’s revealed that Samir is a double agent in deep cover, it’s just a matter of when and where his duped compatriots figure it out. The rules of the genre eliminate the question of when (towards the end of the movie), so where is key – the film pingpongs around the globe with a Bourne-like briskness, from the Middle East to France to Canada. (Toronto audiences will get a tiny thrill out of seeing the Queen streetcar figure so prominently – despite the fact that the city is portrayed as the deadliest spoke in a sprawling axis of evil.)

Roy Clayton and Max Archer (Neal McDonough) are FBI agents in pursuit of terrorists in Traitor. (Rafy/Overture Films/Alliance Films)

The one place the film doesn’t really go is inside Samir’s head. He’s a compelling, unique figure – the first Muslim-American action hero? – and Cheadle plays him with predictable charm and stoicism. But Nachmanoff (who wrote the script based, weirdly, on an idea by Steve Martin) keeps Samir swathed in religious rhetoric, making him as inscrutable to the audience as he is to the radicals he’s deceiving. When Samir inadvertently kills, the guilt hits him like a gunshot, but we are never privy to the private struggles that must roil painfully within him. Were Nachmanoff a more imaginative filmmaker, this could be the film’s point: Samir’s character doesn’t develop because his faith, as genuine as it is, doesn’t develop; he seeks refuge in a kind of spiritual stasis. He lies because everything in this world is an illusion.

The dialogue doesn’t make this case convincingly. It’s largely a platitudinous blend of spook-speak, war-on-terror philosophizing and spiritual bromides (“I answer only to God,” Samir says at one point. “We all do”). The storytelling is equally conventional, never as complex as the subject matter warrants. Traitor has some of Syriana’s political sensibility, but none of its aesthetic flair. Samir loves chess and the game becomes a shopworn metaphor for his predicament – he wants to be a knight of faith, but is a pawn caught forever between competing ideologies. Pearce’s Agent Clayton is actually the more nuanced, complex character – the revelation that he has a doctorate in Arabic studies is perhaps the film’s greatest plot twist.

Traitor is caught between its own competing creative ideologies, striving for piquant political analysis while emulating every undercover-cop movie ever made. Context is everything, however, and Traitor’s context benefits greatly from its novelty. The result is an adequate, middle-of-the-road espionage thriller, sufficiently surprising and competently crafted. Nothing, however, that will change the world.

Traitor opens Aug. 29.

Jason McBride writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.