The two biggest films this week are ugly thrillers about conflicts in the Middle East. Both films mourn the ghastly human price. Both draw similarly gloomy conclusions. Yet these eloquent satires wouldn’t recognise each other if they had to share a wooden soapbox on Speakers’ Corner.

Ridley Scott’s expensive adventure, Body of Lies, is a lump of indigestible paranoia. Leonardo DiCaprio is the most gifted CIA agent who has ever glued on a beard in Iraq. He speaks fluent Arabic and he has martial-arts skills that James Bond would envy. Leo’s task is to hunt down deadly terrorist leaders in the hellholes of Jordan, Iran and Syria without blowing his cover or losing his fingernails. It’s a thankless job for this intense and earnest actor who has famously decided to devote the rest of his career to intense and earnest films. He wears a forbidding frown from start to end.

DiCaprio couldn’t have invented a more sober character — even by Scott’s high-minded standards. The real villain of the piece is Russell Crowe. He is a ludicrously demonic right-wing CIA chief and a remarkable spit of the whistleblower he played in The Insider. The tubby actor models the same short grey hair, reading glasses and unsuspecting wife, while orchestrating illegal missions from the comfort of an armchair in his glass CIA office in Virginia.

DiCaprio’s glum loner is routinely spoon-fed wicked lies by Crowe. They invariably backfire when the beaten-up star needs a favour from the marvellously icy head of Jordanian intelligence, played by Mark Strong. “I have one rule,” Strong says. “Never ever lie to me.”

It’s tough enough trying to kill suicidal loonies and romance a shy Iranian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani) without that kind of pressure. DiCaprio is flung through the front windscreens of assorted cars, blown up, beaten to a pulp and tortured. But despite the immaculate production values, the satire is so unspeakably crude that it ceases to matter. A shame. Scott has been an instrumental director in the Hollywood evolution of war films. But Body of Lies is a one-note rant.

15, 128 minutes

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