Cert 15 Stars 3

Torture, espionage and political dirty tricks give a sharp edge to this dry real life political docudrama which stars the ever busy Adam Driver.

Best known as the baddie Kylo Ren in Star Wars, he plays Dan Jones, an idealistic and impassioned senate staff member leading a US Justice Department investigation controversial CIA use of ‘enhanced interrogation’. i.e. torture, such as waterboarding.

Having obsessively spent five years investigating the CIA and and producing a report which has more pages than the bible, publication is bogged down by party politics and he finds himself accused of whistleblowing, a crime which could result in twenty years in prison.

Scenes of torture such as water boarding as necessarily nasty, and mix with traditional thriller elements such as furtive meetings in car parks.

However there are many more stuffy office scenes than action ones as the script indulges in a hand wringing debate as to what sort of country the US aspires to be.