The Idol (2016; Hany Abu-Assad)

GRADE: C

By Daniel Barnes

Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad garnered Best Foreign Film Oscar nominations for his terrorist dramas Paradise Now and Omar, both mediocre efforts elevated by their presumed hot-button timeliness.  Abu-Assad’s latest film The Idol is something different: an intentionally old-fashioned, feel-good musical biopic.  However, it still offers a lot more of the same perfunctory visuals and sludgy storytelling.

The Idol tells a highly fictionalized version of the life of Mohammed Assaf, a Palestinian singer who galvanized the Arab world when he won Arab Idol in 2013.  There’s plenty of meat in Assaf’s actual life, but Abu-Assad piles on the Andy Hardy contrivances instead.  He splits the story between Assaf’s childhood (depicted here as a Newsies-style world of street bands, adorable urchins, tragedy-tinged hijinks and soldier-on message-mongering) and his long path to Arab Idol as a struggling young taxi driver on the Gaza Strip.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the concept of The Idol, not even the attempt to rewrite an extremely recent real-life event witnessed by the entire world into melodramatic storybook nonsense.  Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly notable about Abu-Assad’s execution either.

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