Cairo Conspiracy (2022, Tarik Saleh) (Patreon)

36/100

Did not belong anywhere near Cannes Competition, where its English-language title was Boy From Heaven; Cairo Conspiracy much more accurately conveys the film's cheesy, harebrained lameness, and it'll no doubt find a home on Showtime right next to Saleh's other disposable 2022 thriller, Chris Pine IS The Contractor. Cataloguing all of the nonsensical narrative elements would take all night, but it's kind of a problem that one is foundational: We're supposed to believe that Egyptian state security—portrayed here as cartoonishly, moustache-twirlingly corrupt—recruits a succession of young scholars, taking care to select the most expendable due to the likelihood of needing to murder them later, because that's the only way of discovering who's part of the Muslim Brotherhood...which Adam then determines, as instructed, by taking attendance at morning prayer. Not clear to me why only Sunni radicals get up early, but even if that's accurate, I mean, video surveillance, anyone? Pretty much everything that's demanded of our feckless hero seems pointless, and that's doubly true of regular café meetings with his handler (Fares Fares, whose reliable hangdog charisma helps a little), during which the two men sit at separate but adjacent tables yet continually interact in ways that would make their relationship unmistakable to any hypothetical observer. The whole thing plays like a third-rate Grisham adaptation that's been clumsily transposed to Egypt (though shot in Turkey), and Saleh, working with his regular editor Theis Schmidt, assembles scenes in a hectic, breathless rhythm that makes it feel as if this two-hour movie has been hastily whittled down from what was originally an eight-episode miniseries. Other countries certainly have the right to churn out this kind of faux-serious nonsense, but Thierry Fremaux can't possibly be so hard up for Middle Eastern(-ish; Saleh lives in Stockholm) selections that he needs to pass off a still-frozen Swanson TV dinner as steak tartare.