‘7 Dogs’ movie review: Hollywood blood, missing soul

What happens when you inject Hollywood blood into the veins of Arabic cinema? A cinematic coup that stakes a claim on cultural soft power. After headline-grabbing football acquisitions, Saudi Arabia seems to be aiming for global box office dominance by mounting a vanity project. Orchestrated by ‘Bad Boys’ Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the Arabic blockbuster, 7 Dogs, lands on our shores in the form of an official Hindi dub.

The film’s explosive action set pieces are engineered by 87Eleven Action Design, known for the cinematic framework of the John Wick universe. By draping its marquee with an array of cross-border icons, from Monica Bellucci and Giancarlo Esposito to Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt, the makers ensure curious eyeballs.

At the centre of this geopolitical playground is an uneasy, high-stakes alliance between a smart Interpol officer, Khalid (Ahmed Ezz brings his sharp charm), and a cunning criminal insider, Ghali (played with gravity by Karim Abdel Aziz). Forced together by circumstance, this explosive cop-crook duo must navigate a global web to dismantle a shadowy, transnational syndicate that brings a bad name to dogs by dealing in a deadly synthetic drug code-named Pink Lady.

The Egyptian stars are in form, their chemistry is electric, and the action set pieces prepare us for a visually spectacular experience. However, the extravaganza fails to find its footing because of generic writing and a stilted Hindi dub. The screenplay functions like an excuse to jump from one explosive set piece to the next. The mix of the protagonists’ personal and professional lives lacks spark, and the twists in the tail could be seen from a distance.

Even the hyperkinetic bullet-camera sequences and the use of anime to remind us we are in a comic-book space feel like self-indulgent gimmicks to show off the production’s high-tech gear rather than serve any real narrative purpose. By aping Hollywood templates, which are losing their charm worldwide, the film strips away the emotional intimacy and rich poetic realism that have defined Arabic cinema for decades.

The cameos work strictly like cameos, high-priced fillers fitted together merely to keep the machine moving. Dutt hams, Khan counts his Riyals, and the rest of the cast merely goes through the motions. Only Monica, as the venomous ringleader, gets to breathe some life into the narrative, and she doesn’t disappoint.

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Even if you want to indulge in the guilty pleasure of watching a mindless entertainer, it doesn’t hold attention for long because the makers confuse motion with narrative progress. Moreover, the action goes into the red because of too much green. The film tries to transport us to the neon-drenched alleys of Shanghai and the bustling high-rises of Mumbai, but because it is shot almost entirely inside Riyadh’s state-of-the-art Al-Hisn Big Time Studios, it loses its soul. The grit is missing. The dust is missing, and the screen remains covered in a mist of artificiality as the sterile digital renders gradually replace the chaotic, organic energy of a real city.

Early in the film, by translating shukriya, which shares deep linguistic roots with the Arabic shukran, into dhanyawad, the localisation team erases the linguistic bridge that already exists between the Indian subcontinent and the Arab world. The robotic Hindi dub breaks any remaining illusion of watching characters made of flesh and blood. Only the bark remains.

7 Dogs is currently running in theatres.