The torture seems a whole lot more believable than the tears in Gavin Hood’s “Rendition,” a film that serves better as a supercharged polemic than as a study of actual human personalities, frailties, or triumphs.

Anyone who has read news reports of the governmental practice of “extraordinary rendition,” to which the title refers, knows the facts all too well. In response to such pesky precedents as habeas corpus and the Geneva Convention, the post-September 11 federal government has resorted to exporting its suspected terrorists to faraway lands where it can intern men and women without charging them, deny them access to lawyers or family, and pry answers from their quivering, drowned, and electrified lips.

It’s a messy business, that much is certain. But as manhandled by the unwise Mr. Hood and the overacting Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep, we see the way reality can be distorted and demolished by a melodrama run amok. A fair number of Americans are indeed repulsed by the horrors of extraordinary rendition, but nothing about the faces and hearts in “Rendition” strikes us as believable representations of what people — on both sides of the issue — are actually like.

Not that newbie screenwriter Kelley Sane leaves any potential drama unexploited. In one corner of this international scandal, we have Isabella (Ms. Witherspoon), a pregnant wife waiting at home for her husband Anwar (Omar Metwally) as he returns to America from a business meeting in Africa. With an American government racing to find the culprits responsible for a suicide bombing, Anwar is taken into custody in the airport terminal, rushed to a back room, loaded onto a plane, and dispatched to a foreign land. In mere minutes of screen time, he is stripped naked, hooded, and thrown into a cell; after another few moments, he finds himself strapped to a chair and fielding questions from Abasi (Yigal Naor), whose words of warning precede a barrage of fists, electrodes, and waterboards.

Looking on all the while is the not-so-subtly named Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), an up-and-comer in the CIA, thrust into a position of authority due to the death of his superior in the suicide bombing. Now he is watching the interrogation of one of the men supposedly behind the attack, but as the days of torture drag on, he begins to suspect something is awry — these tactics are being wasted on a subject who knows nothing. Freeman lodges his protest with the agency’s seeming terrorism czar, Corrine Whitman (Ms. Streep), but Whitman, sitting down to a quiet breakfast prepared by the maid in her picturesque suburban home, won’t have it. Your conscience is irrelevant, she effectively tells him, let the locals do their job.

Yet what keeps “Rendition” from hitting the mark, or provoking the slightest spark of rage, is that we’re never allowed to see what that job really entails. Instead, we begin to realize that this dungeon terror is only one cog in an elaborate movie-making machine, a calculated subplot among many in a movie carefully designed for mass consumption. Sick of seeing the dirty, bleeding husband remanded to solitary confinement? Then focus on the teenage romance subplot between Abasi’s daughter and a young radical Muslim who’s becoming more fanatical by the day. Creeped out by all the electroshock treatments? Then turn instead to the office drama that’s sparked by Isabella, who reaches out to an ex-boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) now working as a senator’s aid, who in turn lobbies his boss to take up the issue of the missing husband.

There’s story piled upon story here, complication stacked upon complication, seemingly three impending catastrophes all lined up. It all leaves the actors going for broke. Ms. Streep’s torture cheerleader is the cold and calculated variation on the sweaty, swearing, steak-eating evildoers from so many action films, but no less one-dimensional. Mr. Gyllenhaal’s Freeman is a wide-eyed testament of shock and dismay, but seemingly incapable of putting his emotional state into words. Ms. Witherspoon, especially, should have read the script a little more closely. The Oscar winner is reduced to a limping, sobbing, screaming cliché, grabbing her swollen belly in the Senate offices and crying out to the heavens for help.

Mr. Hood riveted many with the morally ambiguous “Tsotsi,” carefully crafting a story about a gangster’s unexpected evolution into a conscience-bound father, but he seems incapable of finding any such nuance here. Instead, he plays it safe, and dials down the action to a low simmer — perhaps to avoid charges of sensationalism. But such measured tactics — giving us a torture-lite version of things — seems to run counter to the subject matter.

The use of extraordinary rendition is a horrific act, yet “Rendition” seems to posit that we are meant to care less for those in the cells than we should in the bourgeois repercussions that the detainment stirs. Cry for the Egyptian man? Nah, feel bad instead for the middle-class American wife, for the upper-class government officials who must preside over our war on terror, and, heck, even for the fresh-faced CIA agent who is so put out by having to hear the screams. Even the soap opera antics of Abasi’s daughter and Isabella’s dependence on an ex-boyfriend helps us compartmentalize this story into a romantic comedy mixed with a legal thriller, mixed with some sort of voyeuristic “Saw” torture fantasy.

Heaven forbid we should make the story about a poverty-stricken prisoner whose family is unable to lobby on his behalf, or about a foreign national without a handle on the language whose wife is unaware of beltway politics.

It could make a statement, but instead it seeks only to make a buck. “Rendition” is an inescapably ordinary, gutless mess.

ssnyder@nysun.com