Youssef Rakha enjoys Egypt's first high-tech action flick Mafia is inappropriately named. Which is not to mention its many other faults: shameless derivation, cheap nationalism, divorce from reality, overkill. Yet it will prove historically significant in that it benefits from Hollywood's innovations in the art of injecting the old, old story of Good-verses-Evil with as much raw excitement as possible. Mafia demonstrates all those qualities that make The Matrix, for example, different from good old Diamonds Are Forever, even though both are commercial blockbusters manufactured to deliver maximum-impact suspense, with minor love, social and political interests to taste. In a self- consciously national film (Egypt is everyone's mother and everyone emphatically loves Egypt, even those who have strayed are eventually brought back on course), the genre's traditional fascination with terrorism-stroke-espionage acquires a distinctly psychological bent -- complete with a megalomaniac psychopath who has claims on humanity as a whole (Fight Club), a Silence-of-the- Lambs-class psychotic, a laser-operated security system (Ocean's Eleven) and Wachowski-brother-type pharmaceuticals, which have miraculous and instantaneous powers of transformation. With far greater success than in Youssef Chahine's Al-Akhar (The Other), moreover, the implements of the electronic age are fully integrated. Yet while The Matrix and Fight Club are sustained by their intellectual undertones (the latter, for one action film, cannot be seen in the context of the aforementioned same old story), Mafia proves distressingly simplistic. In his eagerness to isolate and point up the many different modes of excitement from which the genre has increasingly benefited -- supplementing Ronin-quality car chases with Crouching-Tiger-style martial arts training and individual feats of superhuman prowess -- filmmaker Sherif Arafa ends up undermining Medhat El-Adl's already flimsy dramatic scaffolding. The film is vaguely modelled on Luc Besson's classic La Femme Nikita (remade in Hollywood as The Assassin), in which a hopeless criminal is granted a new identity and chance to be a law-abiding citizen in return for working with the French secret intelligence. The heroine begins her training with a seasoned officer and is subjected to a series of exacting tests to prove both her ability and her loyalty. Her intelligence and courage result in her faring well and the officer in question ends up being deeply, sentimentally proud. In Mafia the notion of rehabilitation through espionage acquires patriotic overtones, the role of the hero (Ahmed El-Saqqa) in the intelligence apparatus is reduced to a single, conspiratorial mission (preventing the international and suitably multilingual terrorist, the Butcher, from assassinating the Pope during his visit to Cairo); and the seasoned intelligence officer (Mustafa Shaaban) is joined on the job by a female karate-black-belt psychiatrist (Mona Zaki). This reshuffling of dramatic elements might have worked had it not been for the director's trademark, Disney- inspired tendency to turn what may otherwise be a credible character or situation into caricature. This approach works well enough in comedies, Al-Irhab wal-Kabab (Terrorism and Kebab) being the prime example. In the present film Arafa has no doubt made a leap in his directorial career, but in treading such infinitely trickier terrain he unwittingly flaunts all the weaknesses of his trade. To mention but one example: though the producers (El- Adl Group) have gone to the trouble of filming on location in Europe and recruiting native speakers of English for the foreign roles (the accents of these outsiders and terrorists, one surmises, just happen to be Australian and Scottish), the Butcher -- by far the most important of these roles -- is played by a mediocre Egyptian actor who, on the pretext of the character being fluent in every language on earth, speaks mainly in (mediocre) classical Arabic, a contrivance that ends up being irritating and, in the light of the actor's failure to convey any real sense of iniquity, remarkably unconvincing. El-Adl and Arafa's lack of attention to the details of dramatic purpose and character motivation proves equally problematic. And it is in this context that the principal, two-sided disappointment of uncalled-for patriotism and flash-in-the- pan excitement is most apparent. If the underground chamber in which the new recruit is initially kept is so impressively maximum-security (one cannot help doubting whether this picture of Egyptian secret intelligence in any way concurs with reality), how could the hero, of whose mental powers the intelligence officials in question are fully aware, escape the premises within 24 hours of his capture? Again, the officer may be hard-edged and cruel by nature but, being a beneficent nationalist on the side of Good, there is no justification for his unpleasant behaviour towards the hero except the need to show off what amounts to a fairy-tale view of secret intelligence training: the course to which the latter submits himself, reluctantly at first, proves entirely irrelevant to the actual mission, after all. Similarly, his martial arts training with the psychiatrist is never subsequently put to use; it turns out to be an excuse for the leads to be seen flirting with each other. With women and Copts positively represented, the film aims to be politically correct. Yet in the end the hero's reluctance does not subside until he becomes aware of his latent nationalism -- the virtue of the vicious is throughout presented as the highest moral principle, and the sole justifiable motive not only for risking one's life but for endangering and even taking the lives of others. And while the protagonist's transformation from military student to "international" Europe- based criminal to exemplary intelligence agent is unconvincingly delineated, it is an incidental rhetorical address by Hussein Fahmi -- as the eminently successful, appropriately patriotic public figure Hussein Fahmi -- that effects the hero's final transformation. The temptation of conspiracy theory, too, proves detrimentally distracting: why should the Butcher, after all, turn out to be an agent of Zionism? Even if he was working for a Zionist entity, his computer monitor would not have a massive, in-your-face Star of David on its surface, really, would it? Nor would a legendary assassin like the Butcher spare the hero's life on discovering that he was betraying him, whatever the (equally unconvincing) reasons he cites. That said, Mafia is beautifully shot by Sameh Selim: on the surface it is comparable with the best of Hollywood action. The sets and costumes are convincing, Omar Khairat's atmospheric score is effective and Arafa's use of comedy and sentimentality to diffuse the tension sometimes works. Within the genre's limitations, moreover, the actors produce performances. The pace of the action is sufficiently fast. And despite the nature of its content, the excitement of the film facilitates suspension of disbelief. This is what El-Adl and Arafa were aiming for in the first place. And it is undoubtedly what they have achieved. Mafia has set a technical precedent: perhaps in the not too distant future another, more interesting experiment will be undertaken along similar lines. And in the meantime -- with the suspension of moral discernment and logic as well as disbelief in place -- the audience can at last look forward to two hours of expensively made entertainment.
