OVER A BARREL

SYRIANA IS AN IMPRESSIVE, MULTI-LAYERED THRILLER ABOUT THE WORLD'S UNQUENCHABLE THIRST FOR OIL, WRITES MICHAEL DWYER

SYRIANA

Directed by Stephen Gaghan. Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Mazhar Munir, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet, Christopher Plummer, Robert Foxworth, Max Minghella, Alexander Siddig

15A cert, gen release, 127 min

TAKING its title from the term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical redrawing of the Middle East, Syriana is an enthralling geopolitical thriller that feels as urgent and relevant to today as the great paranoid post-Watergate dramas (The Parallax View, All the President's Men) were in the mid-1970s.

The second film directed by Stephen Gaghan (his debut, Abandon, went directly to video here), Syriana recalls Gaghan's Oscar-winning screenplay for Traffic in its multilayered structure of interlocking narrative strands. The canvas against which all of them are set is the global oil industry in all its machinations and corruption.

In a fictional oil-rich Gulf state, the heir to the throne, Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) is breaking a long-established relationship with US business interests and awarding natural gas drilling rights to a higher bidder - China. This causes consternation in a powerful Texas energy company, which sets its predatory sights on a smaller outfit, which in turn has completed a shady deal for drilling rights in Kazakhstan. A tenacious Washington attorney (Jeffrey Wright) is charged with guiding that merger through the legal process.

Meanwhile, a fast-rising, Geneva-based energy analyst (Matt Damon) suffers a personal tragedy that prompts a lucrative but compromising offer. An embittered young Pakistani immigrant worker (Mazhar Munir) becomes malleable to recruitment by radical extremists. And a veteran CIA operative (George Clooney) with extensive experience in the Middle East is assigned one last job, to assassinate Nasir.

Demanding the alert attention of its audience, Syriana proves thoroughly satisfying and accessible as Gaghan inventively connects and overlaps these globetrotting storylines, fusing them into a dramatically powerful whole. This is achieved while shading the disparate characters in ambiguity and without resorting to simplification of the complex issues raised.

In a keynote diatribe that cuts to the essence of the malaises the movie addresses, a Texas oilman (Tim Blake Nelson) rejects corruption charges, dismissing them as "government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation". Without a trace of a moral compass, he says that there are laws against corruption "precisely so we can get away with it" and that "corruption is our protection".

This ambitious, thought-provoking film takes on a propulsive rhythm heightened by Robert Elswit's fluid camerawork and Tim Squires's editing, and the large cast is imaginatively chosen and uniformly impressive.