Captain Abu Raed

Captain Abu Raed Film Review

Directed by Amin Matalqa 

2007 ‧ Drama ‧ 1h 50m

IMDB            Rotten Tomatoes           Slant Magazine

                                         7.2/10                     80%                            1.5/4

My Rating 

✰✰✰

Captain Abu Raed is a heart warming tale about an elderly man working a lower class job in an airport as a janitor and how he saves and inspires the life of a young troubled kid. The first half of the film felt rather slow but it built up the character of Abu Raed fairly well in a way where we are able to understand why he is the way he is and how his upsetting past shaped him and his reactions to the people around him. Abu Raed makes up stories for the children using an old air pilot's hat he found in the trash at the airport and makes up stories of his fake travels to entertain these children. One child saw through his fables and tried to expose Abu Raed for the liar that he is and makes a point of saying "people like us don't become pilots" to prove his point. This child Murad, is a tormented young boy with an upsetting home life and an abusive alcoholic father to which Abu Raed tries to help the best he can but finds that saving someone from a situation like that is more difficult than it sounds. Although from the first half of the movie you wouldn't really expect it to become a film about saving a boy from domestic abuse so it was somewhat unexpected to me and maybe some other people who have viewed the film as well. Possibly bordering on feeling out of place. 

I'm not really too sure on how this movie impacted me emotionally something about it left me feeling somewhat emotionally confused? Some plot lines weren't very well developed and didn't really need to be in the story like the young boy selling wafers instead of going to school and the young woman pilot who does not want to marry off just yet in defiance of her fathers wishes. These plot lines didn't add all too much to the story and were not really given a strong conclusion for the characters other than Abu Raed and Murad who becomes a airline captain at the end of the film after being inspired by Abu Raed's false tales. A bit of a harsh review of the film by Slant Magazine says "Captain Abu Raed gestures at notions of class inequality and gender pressures within modern Jordanian society, but it’s ultimately content to brush these aside in the name of contrived schmaltz." I don't entirely know if I 100% agree with some of the claims being made in this review but some of them do have a bit of a point. This does seem to be a film about class inequality but the subject does seem more ignored to favor characters which I don't necessarily think is a good or a bad thing. Overall it is a film that should be watched more for the relationship between Abu Raed and Murad, not so much on the story or the societal message. The story turned to be a little cluttered with not integrating the side characters very well and the societal message on class inequality was not explored very well. This film seemed to want to do several things but didn't end up being very successful in tackling all of them.