Egyptian director Sandra Nashaat's latest film Transit Prisoner sacrifices plot for action, writes Hani Mustafa Action film in Egypt has become a major genre and one that is able to compete with comedy for the interest of producers and in the revenue it brings in at the box office. Action films have relatively high production costs -- for locations and for all the car chases and explosions -- but this is also true for comedies. The only difference is that while the directors of action films have to set aside sizable parts of their budgets for the action sequences, the high costs of comedies are due to the salaries of the stars, which are sometimes up to half of total production costs. The stars of action films do not receive comparable pay, since while the success of a comedy is often due to the appeal of the actors action films depend less on the actors and more on the technical details necessary to enrich the script and give an attractive tempo to the editing. Advances in graphics and cinematography have also helped the development of the films. While he may not be as highly paid as some of his colleagues elsewhere in the industry therefore, actor Ahmed Ezz has managed to make a name for himself in action films in recent years, including in earlier films by Nashaat, such as Malaky Iskendria and Al-Rahina. Most recently, Ezz starred in Al-Shabah, which came out last year, and now he is appearing in another film directed by Nashaat, Transit Prisoner, which is currently on general release in cinemas. Transit Prisoner opens with two young men driving a taxi in Alexandria at dawn on their way to robbing a store. They know that the guard leaves for dawn prayers and they plan to conduct the robbery during his absence. As soon as they hear the call to prayer on the radio they begin their assault on the store, not realising that the broadcast comes from Cairo and that dawn prayer in Cairo begins a few minutes before prayer in Alexandria. This mistake makes it difficult to credit the men's reputation as the "the most skillful robbers in Egypt." However, cinema audiences usually pay little attention to details of this sort, and the two robbers, Ali (Ahmed Ezz) and Nabil (Mahmoud Al-Bazawi), are sentenced to 25 years and 10 years in prison, respectively. Ali gets the harsher sentence because the guard is killed during the robbery. All this material is presented in flashback, and the action of the film really starts when Shawki, a high- ranking officer in the military played by Nour El Sherif, comes to visit Ali in prison to tell him that he has been selected for a major patriotic mission. From this point on, Transit Prisoner is similar to another Egyptian action film, Mafia, which starred Mona Zaki, Ahmed El-Saqqa and Mustafa Shaaban and was a hit at the box office despite some obvious goofs. In the latter film, the protagonist received training in the use of weapons and swimming in order for him to be able to carry out a mission that involved robbing the yacht of an Israeli businessman in the Red Sea and bringing back important papers from the yacht's safe. However, instead of pursuing the equivalent line of action straight away in Transit Prisoner Nashaat includes a whole set of distracting developments that are scarcely necessary to the overall development of the plot. Ali changes his name to Abdel-Rahman in order to ensure that he is not recognised and, having received some money, he travels to Kuwait. When he returns six years later, he is married and has a son called Ali, and it is only then that the audience is introduced to the other characters in the film, such as Niveen, Ali's wife, and Shahine, his secretary. Shawqi reappears at this point and asks Ali, aka Abdel-Rahman, to help him apprehend a corrupt member of parliament by stealing incriminating documents from his safe. However, the film introduces an unexpected twist in that following a visit to a state security officer (played by Sherif Mounir) Ali discovers that he has been the victim of a confidence trick: far from being a member of the security services Shawqi is himself a criminal. Thanks to his skill in forgery Shawqi was able to arrange Ali's release from prison and his travel to Kuwait, and he now wants Ali to steal documents from the MP, since this man is his competitor and having the documents to hand will allow Shawqi to outmaneuver him. The film then becomes little more than a melodrama. In scenes reminiscent of Bollywood, Ali's son is killed and the director inserts a long and irritating scene of the mother and father wailing over his body. In Transit Prisoner, director Sandra Nashaat and script writer Wael Abdalla have come close to the formula presented in Malaky Iskendria, in which the audience discovers towards the end of the film that a colleague of the main character has arranged for the cover up of a murder. Similarly, Ali discovers that he has been tricked into carrying out a crime on behalf of another criminal towards the end of Transit Prisoner. However, while Malaky Iskendria had elements that brought it close to the film noir of the 1950s, Transit Prisoner treads an altogether easier path to box office success. This time round Nashaat has presented something that comes close to a Bollywood-style production: the only thing lacking is the song and dance.
