Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s Traitor proffers an unlikely protagonist for a globe-spanning action thriller in Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a Sudanese-American Muslim and purveyor of explosives to would-be suicide bombers. As the film opens, Samir’s latest delivery has landed him in a Yemeni jail, where he looks set to rot until his devotion and integrity attract the notice of a well-connected Islamist named Omar (Saïd Taghmaoui). When Omar’s people bust Samir out of stir, they take him with them and introduce the bomb maker to the leadership of a very active terrorist cell. Before long, this new relationship catches the attention of Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), a federal agent with reason to believe similar terror attacks are planned for the United States.

Traitor bounds between atmospheric locations in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America — watch for Canada in a bit part as a portal for Mujahideen — in unfurling its detailed story, pausing frequently to embellish it with observations about Islam as a religion of peace and the legitimacy of certain pan-Arab gripes about the West. In case you don’t pick it up from Cheadle’s tormented, moist-eyed gazes into the middle distance, Nachmanoff’s script (from a story he wrote with Steve Martin, of all people) obliges Pearce’s by-the-book federal agent to say things like, “Seems like every religion has more than one face.” Taghmaoui’s performance in the third-banana position is much more effective. The French actor has some film-nerd cachet for his memorable turns in movies as diverse as Mathieu Kassovitz’ La Haine and David O. Russell’s Three Kings, and he’s watchable here as well, even playing a guy bent on sowing havoc in the complacent streets of America.

Cheadle is less engrossing. As Pearce mentions in one of the film’s many educational asides, there are 1.2 billion Muslims on the planet and less than a third of them are Arab. That’s why the sleeper cells in America are so treacherous: these terrorist operatives could look like anyone — even Don Cheadle. The actor seems to be bearing the burden of creating a sympathetic Muslim character quite heavily, so much so that his eyes start watering every time the camera rests on him too long.

Nachmanoff is careful to ensure that never happens by sporadically fiddling with camera-on-a-string effects and using that jagged editing style that goes so well with Traitor’s bleached-out, super-grainy action film cinematography. He does jet his cameras to some stunning locations, however, which helps offset the middling melodrama of the script.

Traitor does trot out some effective if slightly run-of-the-mill excitement in its action sequences, but the heavy-handedness of its intentions adds little to the film’s overall momentum or suspense. Maybe the final scene, which speaks to the possibility of rapprochement between Islam and the West, is intended to tie off the movie’s cultural and spiritual probing, but it also leaves a bunch of plot threads whistling in the breeze.

The question of whether you should go see Traitor depends on how you select your international action thrillers. If it’s based solely on the complexity of their global geopolitical outlook, Traitor’s your man.