"Rendition" is a cleverly cryptic sermon on the slippery slope of torture.

It's all well and good, the movie suggests, to have this doctrine of "extraordinary rendition," spiriting terror suspects out of sight and out of the reach of American justice.

Play the technicalities to perfection. Put these people in legal limbo. Insist, self-righteously, that "We don't do torture," but help the untried and the unconvicted disappear into dungeons in countries where American civil liberties and rights don't apply.

And see what this "torture by proxy" gets you.

In Gavin Hood's film, an American-educated, Egyptian-born chemist (Omar Metwally) with a wife and family gets on a plane after attending a conference in South Africa. But before he reaches U.S. Customs, he is nabbed from the terminal, his head covered in a sack, hands and legs shackled, and he's off to "North Africa" (Morocco, you think?) where he can be stripped, water-boarded, slapped, and shocked without getting American hands dirty.

All because of suspicious phone calls. He picked the wrong day to answer his cell, the wrong day to take an international flight. A bomb has just gone off. A CIA functionary has been killed.