Speaking of terrorists....
"What happened to the kid who loved Duran Duran?" someone asks a Pakistani man who will soon have enough explosives strapped to him to blow both himself and dozens of New Yorkers to kingdom come. Once a child, Hassan (Ayad Akhtar) has put away childish things to pursue the fate Allah has laid out for him. And it seems that Allah wants Hassan to get some payback for having been abducted off the streets of Paris, flown back to Pakistan and tortured repeatedly ' a suspected terrorist, it appears. For better or worse, The War Within, directed by Joseph Castelo from a script by Castelo, Akhtar and Tom Glynn, never reveals whether Hassan had any reason to arouse suspicion. But he sure develops one upon his release. Three years later, he arrives in New York ready to blow up Grand Central Station.
"It reminds me of a mosque back home," he says when staking out the famous transportation hub. How the filmmakers got permission to shoot there is anybody's guess, but it gives the movie a bracing slap of reality. Hassan's tour guide, a Pakistani-American woman named Duri (Nandana Sen), is the sister of Hassan's childhood friend, Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), who's welcomed the newly devout Muslim into his home, unaware of his plans. Sayeed's is a warm, happy family that's done well in the United States, thus the war within Hassan's heart between this world and the next. If you ask me, it isn't much of a contest, perhaps because Hassan's too far gone or perhaps because Akhtar doesn't have the acting chops to convey the internal struggle Hassan's going through. His last words, before the screen goes dark: "God is great."
