EUC: A symptom of failure

EUC gives reason why comedies in Egypt should be revolutionised: the characters are shallow, and stereotypes provide no humour

The January 25 Revolution has brought Egyptians hope that comprehensive change is possible. If there is any change to be hoped for in the movie industry, it is for production of movies like EUC to stop.
This is one of the movies where a group of people must have got together and said, “Let's make a movie.” But then the thinking stopped as even the premise, the only thing going for the film, is stolen straight from the American movie Accepted (2006).Arduously, with much labour, this ripped-off starting point is presented in what could have been five minutes of screen time.
Two friends Omar (Kareem Qassem) and Ehab (Mohamed Sallam) fail to score high enough in their final year of secondary education to have them enrolled in public university. They lie about their scores and in their attempted cover-up in lieu of their parents' disappointment they claim to have enrolled in a fictional private university, Egyptian University in Cairo (EUC). As pressures mounts, they create a website and rent out a villa for a day to prove to their parents that the university exists. They realise theymay have pushed the lie too far when other students with similarly low grades are ready to enrol in their university. They are pushed deeper into the lie and find themselves creating a real university and improvising along the way.
It seems no time was spent to develop the idea beyond the premise, upon which the makers found what seemed like endless decades of screen time to fill. The improvisational manner in which the film was made seems liken to the clueless manner in which the boys ran the university in the movie's plot. The result is a flimsy story line and prolonged excruciating scenes that make you fidget in your chair.
Much of the acting is stagnant, but is only symptomatic of the much larger problem, which is a lack of direction. It is unclear whether direction is poor because the script is so stale or because the director, Akram Farid, is not at all engaged with Omar Gamal's script. There are many shot sequences with numerous edit cuts that show at least some kind of technical proficiency on the part of Farid; however, they are completely disconnected from everything else and serve only to break any kind of harmony that may have been attempted.
While some technique may be present, vision is completely absent. The scenes lack any form of choreography and there is very little camera movement. The camera angles rarely change and all actors are positioned in front of the camera almost all the time as though performing in a theatre. The dull picture did, however, reflect the flatness of the characters. The actors —it appears —did not receive any direction as to how they must play out the scene; each actor is left to his own devices, and their reactions to one another seemed inconsistent and incompatible.In the end, the scenes were mundane and humour was transformed into insipidness.
There are moments in the script that are reminiscent of Omar Gamal's first work Awqat Faragh (Idle Times) where his depictions of a young generation with much energy and no purpose were fairly telling. EUC's script is filled with such attempts, but lacks any success. While some lines contain a great deal of authenticity on account of accurate language used by youth, other lines that contain sexual references are too explicit and borderline crassness. The characters are stereotypical and in making the characters funny, they have been so far removed from reality that one cannot engage with them.
In the likeness of many movies within the same genre, EUC attempts to find a message to deliver near the end. This final attempt of trying to expose the weakness of the Egyptian education system, besides falling flat on its face, is as repulsive as a tone-deaf violin player mocking the errors of a piano student.
There are few and far between moments that induce some laughter, but these few moments are not near enough to save the film or deem it entertaining.