Traitor is Syriana for dummies, a globe-hopping, multi-character look at the war between America and Islamic terrorists that keeps things as relatively simple as an episode of 24. Not that there's anything wrong with that: 24 is a really good show. But it doesn't pretend to be something it's not, either.

For the first hour of Traitor, though, writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff sets up a drama far more complex and ambiguous than the one we ultimately get. The film's titular anti-hero is Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a devoted Muslim born in Sudan (where he saw his father blown up by a car bomb), who later moved to Chicago and worked as an intelligence officer for the U.S. government.

When we meet him, though, Samir has gone off the grid and is now running with an entirely different gang, selling explosives to a terrorist group in Yemen co-headed by the Moroccan Omar (Said Taghmaoui). Both men are nabbed in a raid headed by a pair of FBI agents (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough) who try to get Samir to talk in exchange for leniency. When he refuses, they leave him to rot in a Yemen prison.

It is there that Samir develops a strong bond with Omar, whose initial mistrustfulness of Samir gives way to a brotherly respect and admiration. By the time the two men bust out of prison and reconnect with Omar's terrorist network, Traitor has gotten you to see them as people first and fanatics second.

Cheadle, who excels at playing conflicted men torn between duty and conscience, and Taghmaoui, who has made a career of playing Arab baddies since his memorable debut in 1995's La Haine, give their characters real dimension and heft, helping you understand how otherwise sane men could recruit teenagers for suicide-bombing missions in the name of God.

Alternating between the terrorists' machinations and the agents on their trail, Traitor (which was inspired by a story originally conceived by Steve Martin) maintains a surprisingly even-keeled tone, reminiscent of Syriana's cool, journalistic approach. By keeping its central focus on Samir, the story doesn't overwhelm the audience with names and places. Instead, it forces you to confront your feelings toward Samir, a seemingly honorable and respectable man who willingly plots to kill innocent people.

Then the twists start to spring forth, the bad guys start spouting lines like ''Terrorism is theater, and our audience is the American people,'' and Traitor becomes a ticking-bomb story about finding the bad guys before it's too late. The action-thriller stuff is serviceable, if unremarkable, but there's no denying the sense that the filmmakers lost their nerve. At least Syriana dared to follow its theme of the insidious nature of terrorism to its tragic, unthinkable end. In Traitor, Hollywood rushes in to save the day.

Cast: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Neal McDonough, Archie Panjabi, Jeff Daniels

Writer-director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Producers: David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, Don Cheadle

An Overture Films release. Running time: 113 minutes. Vulgar language, violence, gore, adult themes. Playing at area theaters.

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