I saw this movie yesterday, and wound up liking it quite a bit more than I’d expected. The acting and dialogue is all great, and they only have one clumsily expository scene despite the heavy-handed political theme. Unfortunately, one of the three plot threads the film follows is done in a confusing way for reasons that seem under-motivated, but you don’t actually start being confused by it until near the end.
Meanwhile, while making a bunch of other worthy political points in obvious ways, it also did a good job with a subtler point, namely that normal people find the idea of torturing another human being distasteful. And everyone understands that. A normal person isn’t going to have the stomach for the torturing job. So, consequently, once you adopt routine torture as a matter of policy you’re soon enough going to find that your torturers — not the Bushes and Cheneys and Yoos but the people who actually need to get their hands dirty — are going to be people inclined toward sadism. Normal people aren’t going to want to be professional torturers, and the ranks of professional torturers are going to be filled with people who like torturing. Like everything about this foul business, of course, that’s a terrible way to get accurate information.