THE WORTHY (2016)

Americans, Europeans and Japanese share a wide range of post-apocalyptic fantasies, but it's unusual to see similar fantasies from other countries. Here's one from the United Arab Emirates, albeit shot in Romania, and to be honest there's nothing really unique about Ali F. Mostafa's film or VikramWeet's screenplay except the location. It's supposed to be somewhere in the Middle East, though it could be narrowed down further depending on how you interpret one character's reference to the "home of the religions of God." God hasn't smiled on the old home ground lately; civilization has collapsed and most water supplies are hopelessly contaminated. One small band of survivors have holed up in an abandoned airplane factory that they've made into a fortress with its own convenient plumbing system. You can't trust strangers, as patriarch Idrees (Samer al Masri) learns when he opens the gate to aid a fragile looking female, only to be faced with her master who uses her as a hostage to extort water our little band. Such negotiations as they are fall apart, but another stranger, also with a woman in tow, appears fortuitously to rescue Idrees, taking a friendly-fire bullet in the process. This is Mussa (Samer Ismail); his sidekick is Gulbin (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a Kurd whom only Mussa can understand.

Outside and inside one of civilization's last redoubts with the cast of The Worthy.

Mussa's heroism earns him a meal and some meatball surgery, but he's made to understand that if he and Gulbin intend to stay he has to abide by Idrees's rules. He quickly shows that he intends to recognize no master but himself, throwing the group into panicked disarray. Leaving Gulbin behind, he moves to assert control over the facility by cutting off the water supply. The film spirals out of control at this point, turning Mussa into the typical thriller supervillain, almost limitlessly versatile at setting traps on short notice. Worse, he has a point to make as he picks people off one and two at a time in an attempt to find one who might be "worthy" of joining forces with him and others who plan to rebuild society in their own Darwinian image.

More an international production than an authentic product of any particular culture, The Worthy is slickly generic, benefitting from nice production design and cinematography by Adrian Silisteanu. Mostafa's direction is reasonably suspenseful and from what I could tell from watching a subtitled version of the film he got good work from his actors. But like most post-apocalypse films since Mad Max, Worthy is too into the thrills of de-civilized existence to have anything real to say about social disintegration. That wouldn't be a problem if Mostafa had made a great action film, but by the climactic confrontation on a teetering airplane wing, with Idrees's daughter Maryam Rakeen Saad) chained and noosed at one end and Mussa at the other, threatening to jump off and let Maryam hang as her brother Eissa (Mahmoud al-Atrash) watches from the middle, the action had become cartoonish. A twist at the end leaves the story open-ended, raising the prospect of a sequel reversing the original situation as a vengeful survivor infiltrates the enemy's base, but I doubt whether Worthy will leave people wanting another chapter of the story.

RATTLE THE CAGE (Zinzana, 2015)

For the first time in a long while I've created a new country label. Majid al-Ansari's thriller apparently is the first widely circulated movie, thanks to Netflix, produced in the United Arab Emirates. Many observers are impressed by the novelty of a crime thriller from that source. What they seem to be impressed by, and what actually depresses me somewhat, is that al-Ansari and his writers have made a slickly generic picture that could have been made just about anywhere on Earth. Zinzana is a rather familiar seeming Tarantinian chamber piece in the manner of Reservoir Dogs, featuring violence and badassery in a single location. This time it's a small-town police station in an unnamed Middle Eastern country -- apparently a still-secular one with female police officers in modern dress. The story is pulp simple: a prisoner is being transferred to this small-town station, but his brother (Ali Suliman), apparently a bigger, badder, crazier criminal, plans to free him by taking over the place and impersonating the sherif, thus taking custody of his kin without a struggle -- after killing the sherif beforehand, that is.

 

Something complicates the master plan: somebody actually gets arrested. Talal (Saleh Bakri), trying to salvage his marriage, got into a fight at a hotel and was nabbed for drunk and disorderly. It takes him forever to get the sherif to let him make a phone call, only to have his estranged wife refuse to speak to him. Soon afterward Dabaan, the master criminal, arrives and stabs the sherif to death through the ear. Since it would be too much trouble to kill Talal, Dabaan tries to get him to cooperate, or at least to not make waves. He gains leverage over Talal in two ways. First, he uses the landline phone's callback feature to learn the identity of Talal's wife. Second, another officer, the asthmatic, out-of-shape, good-natured Aida (Yasa), reports for secretarial duty. To his credit, Dabaan doesn't instantly try to kill her. Instead, he goes out of his way, and over the top, to flatter and flirt with her, to distract her from any questions about his identity. Yet his ability to kill her at any time is an inducement for Talal to cooperate, however passively. Realistically, however, Talal knows that this madman will have to cover his trail in a way that leaves no one alive. In particular, he knows he doesn't stand a chance, since Dabaan's endgame is to burn the station down with Talal inside, to let investigators assume that the charred body in the cell is Dabaan's brother. To prevent further killing, not to mention save himself, Talal will somehow have to free himself from the maniac holding the key to his cell.

Suliman sinks the film for me with his bombastic, cartoonish performance as Dabaan. Al-Ansari indulges Suliman to ridiculous extremes while indulging himself with pompous overhead shots of the villain in full arms-outstretched crowing glory. To make the Tarantino influence even more obvious, al-Ansari even has Suliman dance menacingly to pop music on the radio a la Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. And then he goes to another camp level by staging a comic dance number with an unctuous Suliman and a ponderous Yasa. If anyone was hoping for a realistic portrait of crime and law enforcement in the Arab world, that scene tramples their hopes once and for all. I suppose there's a method to the director and actor's madness, however, since it does make you increasingly eager for Talal to turn the tables on Dabaan as violently as possible. It is satisfying to see Talal take the offensive, simply because Dabaan had become so insufferable, and I was happily surprised to see the film end on an anticlimactic note when I was expecting it to end Die Hard style with Yasa in the Reginald VelJohnson role of last-second rescuer. Ultimately, alas, Rattle the Cage is less dumb fun than just dumb, and not even dumb in any redemptively unique, culturally particular way. You could remake a story like this anywhere, or you could believe it was a remake of a story from elsewhere.  That's not a good impression for an aspiring national cinema to make.