Traitor Rater

As your humble Haiku Reviewer, I bring you Traitor. The Don Cheadle movie that makes you wonder why so many decent movies are, unfortunately, stuck with such poor, cringe-inducing titles that you can see the ticket sales dwindling. Traitor? Really, that's the best title you could come up with? The Middle Man would've been a better title. It even fits, a bit.

When you see the title, Traitor, you're already thinking why didn't this movie go straight to DVD? Or maybe you're wondering whether it's the sequel to Shooter starring Mark Wahlberg. It's not. Shooter, now there's a poor film. Sunshine, was another solid film unnecessarily weighed down by a title without substance. I doubt many people, other than myself, saw it in theaters because who wants to see a movie called Sunshine. It's probably a documentary about global warming (depressing) or an empowering children's film about kids who are allergic to the sun (boring, unless you're also allergic to the sun). Sunshine, in fact, is a science-fiction film with a compelling premise. In the future, our sun is dying, and a team of scientists are sent to send a nuclear explosion into the sun to rekindle its life for many more years, but the closer the team gets to the sun, the more they are plagued with obstacles. It's like the low-budget, better, futuristic, more plausible Armageddon, even though the end strays from what was working and gets a tad ridiculous.

Titles, they can be motors propelling films forward or anchors dragging the the ship to a standstill. The rest of the time, titles are just floating around like buoys, marking their location and taking nothing from the table. Traitor is an anchor. Don Cheadle deserved better.

Terrorists are bad,
but who are the terrorists?
Ask Cheadle, he knows.

If you want to watch a thriller with modern-day relevance, give it a shot.

Jared