Hollywood Botches Beirut

Beirut, the new Hollywood production by director Brad Anderson and Bourne trilogy screenwriter Tony Gilroy, is getting mostly good reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 78 percent. It’s safe to say that the vast majority of the reviewers aren’t any more familiar with the actually existing city of Beirut, Lebanon, than the film’s director and screenwriter are.

It tells the story of Mason Francis Skiles, the deputy CIA chief in Beirut in the early 1970s shortly before the civil war broke out...