Asad versus 7 Dogs: Two starkly different movies compete to be the summer Arab blockbuster

It’s the Barbenheimer of the Arab box office: the two biggest summer blockbusters are locked in a frenzied battle for the soul of regional cinema.

In one corner is Asad, the highly anticipated new feature from Moon Knight director Mohammed Diab, starring Mohammed Ramadan, the reigning king of Arab television.

In the other is 7 Dogs, the big-budget, Saudi-financed action comedy directed by Bad Boys duo Adil El el-Arbi and Bilall Fallah and headlined by Egypt’s two biggest box-office stars, Karim Abdel Aziz and Ahmed Ezz, alongside Monica Bellucci, Salman Khan and Martin Lawrence.

The two films could scarcely be more different. Asad is a historical epic centred on the little-explored history of Black slavery in Egypt. 

At its heart, 7 Dogs is a contemporary action thriller that flaunts its lavish production values in every frame. 

The former is a sincere, but flawed, attempt at serious-minded entertainment with socio-political connotation. 

The latter is a statement of intent from the behemoth Saudi film industry, whose financial muscle is unrivalled across the region.

The drubbing 7 Dogs has inflicted on Asad at the Arab box office raises broader questions about the meteoric rise of the Gulf market, aggressive marketing of regional blockbusters, and the stuttering trajectory of Arab mainstream cinema, caught between aspirations for social relevance and a cynical commercialism constrained by state, media and public censorship.

Overcoming slavery

Set in 19th century Ottoman Egypt, Asad opens with a flashback to the childhood of its eponymous protagonist, an African boy living in an unnamed country who is abducted by a band of European slave traders and sold into slavery in Egypt. 

The story then jumps ahead 20 years to 1840. Asad has grown into a powerfully built young man engaged in a forbidden romance with Layla (Razane Jammal), the Levantine daughter of his owner and slave trader, Mahrous (Kamel El Basha). 

The film's primary antagonist is Yakan (Aly Kassem), an aristocrat whose sadism and visceral hatred of Asad stems from the closely guarded secret that his own mother is a self-loathing Black slave.

The social order is upended when the progressive heir to the throne (Ahmed Dash) persuades his father, the Khedive (Maged El-Kidwani), to enact a law abolishing the slave trade and granting enslaved people the right to earn their freedom - provided their masters consent. 

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When Layla becomes pregnant, Yakan retaliates by castrating Asad and throwing him into prison.

On the eve of Yakan's wedding to Layla, Asad escapes captivity and embarks on a dual quest for vengeance and liberation, rallying fellow slaves to form an outlaw army.

The slave trade did indeed exist in Egypt, dating - in the form depicted in Asad - to around the 7th century with the Arab-Muslim conquest of the country. 

It was not restricted to Africans: Circassians, Central Europeans, and Central Asians were also captured, sold, or recruited into various forms of servitude and labour, ranging from military service and agriculture to domestic and sexual slavery.

The trade began to decline in the late 19th century, particularly after the 1877 Anglo-Egyptian Convention for the Abolition of Slavery, and was largely dismantled by the early 20th century.

The long and complex history of slavery in Egypt and the wider Arab world has seldom been addressed in film or television. 

Asad was initially thought to mark a precedent by opening up one of the most contentious chapters in Egypt’s past, though it ultimately does not fully do so.

A struggle for freedom

Co-written by Diab's siblings Khaled and Shereen, the pair behind this year's smash-hit comedy Bershama, Asad is an overly familiar historical slave narrative, echoing films such as Spartacus, Braveheart and 12 Years a Slave. 

Unlike these works, however, Asad lacks a clearly defined historical framework, with Diab instead opting to sidestep any sustained engagement with the subject it evokes.

Throughout the film’s promotional campaign, Diab has insisted that the story is not about African slavery per se, but rather a universal struggle for freedom. 

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However, given the historical signposts that frame the film, and the basic fact that African slavery did exist in Egypt, its refusal to meaningfully engage with that history is a major cop-out that diminishes the political importance of the film.

Stripped of that dimension, Asad becomes an otherwise conventional historical drama: derivative in its narrative, competently made in terms of production values and direction, but ultimately offering little beyond surface-level spectacle.

Asad is, above all, a formulaic Ramadan vehicle: another melodrama in which he is cast as an oppressed, persecuted man who returns from a quasi-death to avenge those who wronged him and restore justice. 

Ramadan’s work often reworks, in secularised form, a Christ-like narrative arc; in Asad, he reaches a new operatic peak that further consolidates his established screen persona, with little variation. He remains watchable, but the predictability of his well-worn schtick gradually wears thin.

The film does, however, contain a discernible rebellious charge against oppressive systems and patriarchy. 

Spirit of the 2011 revolution

Some of its lexicon is drawn from the language of the 2011 revolution, which Diab has openly championed in the past. 

This is arguably the film’s strongest asset: its attempt to evoke the defeated spirit of Egypt’s largest modern uprising and to underline the moral imperative of the struggle for freedom.

In their previous collaborations, Diab and Ramadan have shared a clear distrust of formal authority: a sense of disillusionment in which justice can only be restored when the law is taken into the individual’s own hands, often accompanied by a rebellious impulse, whether internal or collective. 

Alas, the Diabs’ monotonous, anaemic storytelling leaves little room to excavate these ideas with the depth they demand. 

By the halfway mark, exhaustion sets in, and the film plods toward its predictable conclusion.

Asad is a work undone by glaring contradictions: a historical drama that shies away from the very particularities of history; an ambitious epic that never transcends the conventions and cliches of its frustratingly simplistic narrative; a serious-minded spectacle that aspires to entertain while provoking reflection yet ultimately accomplishes neither.

The film lurches between artistic ambition and commercial calculation, taking one step forward only to retreat the next.

It is by no means a poor film. There is evident craftsmanship throughout, and Diab, thankfully, reins in the excessive sentimentality that weighed down much of his earlier work. 

A more forthright engagement, however, with its historical and political context might have endowed the film with greater urgency and resonance, but it would not have resolved its deeper shortcomings. 

Asad could, and should, have marked a significant leap forward for Arab mainstream cinema. 

Turki al-Sheikh as co-writer

Diab should nonetheless be commended for attempting to inject a measure of freshness into the Arab summer season. 

The same cannot be said of 7 Dogs, the year's highest-grossing Arab film and, by some distance, the worst picture I've seen from any country this year.

It is a brainchild of Turki al-Sheikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority and arguably the most powerful figure in Arab entertainment, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

The movie is a globe-trotting espionage thriller whose every overstuffed frame seems to scream, "Money, money, money!"

Ahmed Ezz, Sheikh’s favourite Egyptian star, plays Khalid, a police officer described by his awestruck colleague (Tara Emad) as "the star of Interpol”.

Having traded the field for a desk job in order to marry his sweet but sketchily drawn fiancee (Hana El Zahed), Khalid is inevitably pulled out of his short-lived retirement to hunt down the Middle Eastern operative of the eponymous criminal ring after it unleashes a lethal narcotic on the world.

Assisting Khalid is Ghaly (Karim Abdel Aziz), a former member of the Dogs whom Khalid has recently apprehended following a gravity-defying mid-air brawl and who is subsequently imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.

The unlikely pair embark on a journey almost entirely devoid of suspense, crossing paths with the aforementioned constellation of international stars, all of whom appear to be sleepwalking through this lifeless excuse for a story.

Dogs belongs to a familiar strain of Arab commercial cinema: the "tourist film" - a vacuous pageant that parades a succession of glamorous locations, from Shanghai and Mumbai to Las Vegas and, inevitably, Riyadh, reducing each to little more than an interchangeable postcard backdrop for its incessant, hyperactive action.

Arbi and Fallah first made their name with a series of gritty, if somewhat airless, Belgian crime dramas before being recruited by Columbia and Jerry Bruckheimer to helm the last two Bad Boys installments. 

Much like the Will Smith franchise, the action in 7 Dogs is utterly devoid of personality: a hodgepodge of stolid martial arts and obligatory pyrotechnics, punctuated by uninspired anime-like interludes that reinforce the film's throwback 1990s arcade aesthetic.

The icing on the cake is watching Ezz and Abdel Aziz perform in English, with nearly every line reading as painfully stilted. 

Half-hearted attempts at humour, alongside perfunctory subplots involving murdered fathers and fractured families, do little to relieve the suffocating mechanicalness of the proceedings.

Arbi and Fallah make no discernible effort to transcend the hackneyed screenplay, content instead to indulge Sheikh’s every whim while supplying the ideal visual counterpart to his juvenile high-testosterone imagination.

A lack of emotional stakes

The movie’s greatest failing, however, is its complete lack of self-awareness. There is nothing inherently wrong with loud action cinema provided it offers, one hopes, some emotional or dramatic thread for the weary viewer to latch onto. 

Yet the hubris underpinning Sheikh’s screenplay prevents it from accomplishing the most basic objective of the blockbuster: to entertain.

The film has everything money can buy: Marquee stars, lavish set pieces, colossal production values - and not a shred of soul. 

It is the kind of film artificial intelligence could plausibly assemble: robotic, dehumanising, and relentlessly numbing.

For all the gulf separating Asad and 7 Dogs in ambition and intent, the two films ultimately share the same shortcomings: unimaginative action choreography and a striking indifference to the implications of the violence they depict.

It is the kind of film artificial intelligence could plausibly assemble: robotic, dehumanising and relentlessly numbing

Arab action cinema remains trapped in a game of catch-up with its Asian counterparts, imitating far more often than it innovates. 

The continual evolution of hand-to-hand combat choreography - as exemplified by Kenji Tanigaki's exhilarating work in The Furious and the work of the great action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura - demonstrates the aesthetic possibilities of action as a vehicle for both dramatic expression and the organisation of cinematic space into new shapes and movement. 

It is an evolution that Arbi and Fallah appear unable to comprehend. Simply put, we have seen this brand of action countless times before, executed with greater imagination, greater momentum, and far more heart.

Diab's action sequences, by contrast, are conventionally staged, functioning primarily in the service of the unfolding drama. 

They’re straightforward, easy on the eye, and neat to a fault, yet they rarely externalise the emotional turmoil of the characters or exploit action as a vehicle for psychological expression.

The violence, on the other hand, is sloppily uncalculated in both films. In 7 Dogs, it occupies a curious middle ground that reflects the film's broader creative bankruptcy: neither gleefully excessive in the vein of RoboCop nor viscerally immersive like The Raid and its sequel. 

Arbi and Fallah deploy violence with repellent nonchalance, reducing it to another disposable component of the spectacle. 

It lacks both the balletic elegance of Asian action cinema and the philosophical charge that animates the work of Quentin Tarantino. 

It is, in other words, violence in its most generic Hollywood form: ugly, gratuitous and indiscriminate.

An ordeal of endurance

Diab, meanwhile, embraces a far more graphic aesthetic in pursuit of authenticity, whatever that may be. 

Asad is awash with bloodletting - lacerations, mutilations, dismemberments, decapitations and eviscerations. 

Yet while his treatment of violence is more considered than that of Arbi and Fallah, it remains dramatically and philosophically inert.

In slavery narratives such as 12 Years a Slave and, even more strikingly, The Underground Railroad, violence serves multiple functions. 

In the former, it becomes an ordeal of endurance from which neither the characters nor the audience are granted release.

In the latter, Barry Jenkins uses violence to destabilise subjectivity itself, repeatedly rupturing the viewer's gaze in ways that force us to confront the ethics of looking.

Asad, by comparison, treats violence as little more than a functional ingredient of the drama. 

Neither the director's gaze, as a chronicler of a neglected chapter of history, nor the lasting consequences of violence on its perpetrators and victims are meaningfully interrogated. 

The lukewarm reception afforded to this year's two biggest Arab event films suggests that industrial growth should not be mistaken for artistic progress

The spectator is consequently reduced to a passive observer of physical brutality presented as yet another routine convention of contemporary commercial cinema.

Neither 7 Dogs nor Asad appears likely to recoup its production costs. Produced for a reported $8m, excluding marketing, Asad has grossed a modest $2m across the region's three largest markets - Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE - after a month in release. 

Meanwhile, 7 Dogs has earned approximately $15m in its first three weeks against a reported budget of between $40m and $70m according to Deadline.

Although Asad demonstrated respectable staying power during its opening weeks, its slide to sixth place at the Egyptian box office suggests its popular appeal may be more limited than its makers anticipated. 

Dogs suffered a steep 70 percent decline in its second weekend despite an unprecedented promotional campaign across Sheikh’s vast media ecosystem.

The film may not need to recover its investment to justify its existence, but its precipitous box-office decline nevertheless demonstrates that financial muscle alone cannot manufacture sustained audience enthusiasm. 

Asad, conversely, suggests that artistic ambition and worthy intentions, absent of genuine intellectual risk, are not enough to produce a compelling work.

The Arab theatrical market is expanding rapidly. Attendance is rising, investment has reached unprecedented levels, and the appetite for locally produced cinema continues to grow.

Yet the lukewarm reception afforded to this year's two biggest Arab event films suggests that industrial growth should not be mistaken for artistic progress. 

Bigger budgets and slicker production values are no substitute for imagination, formal invention, or social urgency. Increasingly, those qualities - not spectacle alone - are proving to be the defining strengths of the region's most vital popular cinema.