Political filmmaker Michael Winterbottom ("The Road to Guantanamo," "In This World") brings his docu-drama style to the tragic story of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.  Pearl, the Journal's Southeast Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped by al-Qaeda thugs in Karachi, Pakistan, in January 2002 and later murdered.  A gruesome video of his decapitation was widely circulated via television and internet. 

Winterbottom's film, based on a memoir by Pearl's widow, French journalist Mariane, focuses on the frantic five-week search that followed Danny's disappearance.  Brief scenes of the Pearls in earlier, happier times are sprinkled throughout the film—perhaps to add context, perhaps to relieve the oppressive tension. 

The film proceeds in the style of a police-procedural as it recreates the frantic efforts of Mariane (Angelina Jolie) and colleague Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi), Pakistani police, and agents from the FBI and the U.S. State Department's security services to track down Danny's kidnappers and location.  To his credit, Witterbottom maintains a high level of suspense throughout despite the fact that the audience already knows Danny's fate. 

The acting is solid and occasionally inspired.  English actress Archie Panjabi is excellent as Danny's colleague Asra Nomani, and Indian actor Irrfan Khan steals scenes as a Pakistani cop known only as Captain. 

The movie, of course, belongs to Jolie as Danny's pregnant wife.   With her dark complexion, French accent, and frizzy hair, Jolie bears a striking resemblance to the Cuban-Belgian Mariane Pearl.  Beyond that, she hits all the right notes in an emotional roller-coaster. 

Ms. Jolie's problem is her larger-than-life celebrity which becomes a serious distraction when she's fronting for a real person.  There are many powerful moments in this movie, and Ms. Jolie's performance is uniformly deft.  But, I never forgot that it was Angelina Jolie on the screen, not Mariane Pearl.  Celebrity cuts both ways. 

Given the polemical nature of much of Winterbottom's previous work, "A Mighty Heart" is surprisingly even-handed.  That doesn't mean fair and balanced though.  Randall Bennett (Will Patton), the U.S. Embassy's security director, is portrayed as relishing the fact that Pakistani cops are not restrained by due process niceties.  While Pearl's treatment at the hands of his captors is kept off-screen, there are extended scenes showing Pakistani officials, with U.S. complicity, using torture to obtain information from suspected terrorists. 

The movie's most dishonest moment, however, comes when Mariane tells an interviewer  that it's the "misery" of places like Karachi—a densely-packed, third-world city made all the more claustrophobic and menacing by Winterbottom's use of hand-held cameras and rapid editing—that produces terrorists. 

Forget that the 9/11 hijackers tended to be middle-class and college-educated.  And, that Osama bin Laden is the scion of a wealthy Saudi businessman. 

To see how tenuous the link is between poverty and terrorism, Winterbottom need have looked no farther than Omar Saeed Sheikh, the mastermind behind Pearl's kidnapping.  Sheikh appears only briefly, however, and we learn little about him. 

Perhaps that's because Sheikh's radicalism was rooted in ideology—a virulent strain of religious fascism born of intolerance, misogyny, and delusion—and not economic "misery." 

Omar Sheikh is a British citizen and the son of a prosperous businessman and has never known economic misery.  Despite an expensive education and ample opportunities, he chose the path of terror and murder.  Those facts are well known but were ignored by Winterbottom. 

Despite these missteps, "A Mighty Heart" is a powerful and instructive movie.  The evil that threatens our way of life and the reason we fight today is there for all to see, even if Winterbottom partially obscures the roots of that evil. 

Military.com Rating: *** (three stars)

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DVD Tip:  Originally broadcast in 2006 and released on DVD in February 2007, this excellent HBO documentary covers much the same ground as A Mighty Heart.  Here, however, the filmmakers also examine the background of both Pearl and his kidnapper, the British-born jihadi Omar Sheikh.  Even so, the radicalization of the bright and privileged Sheikh remains a mystery.  Despite a shared privileged upbringing, as adults, Pearl and Sheikh could not have been more different.  Sheikh is a coward and thug who hides in the shadows and murders the innocent.  Pearl, a Jew, is tolerant and finds much to admire in Middle Eastern culture—so much so that his colleagues at the Journal affectionately refer to him as "Danny of Arabia."  The heart of the documentary, however, revolves around Pearl's 2002 kidnapping and execution (a taped beheading) in Karachi, Pakistan, where he was investigating the connection among shoe-bomber Richard Reid, al-Qaeda, and Pakistan's intelligence service.  The desperate search for Pearl is told through poignant interviews with Pearl's wife Mariane, his colleagues, and author Bernard-Henri Levy (Who Killed Daniel Pearl?).  Veteran CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour narrates.  By all means, see A Mighty Heart, but don't overlook this authentic and often harrowing glimpse into the heart of darkness.