“Eagles of the Republic” is a Cairo-set political thriller one can slot into the next class: motion pictures about life underneath autocracy that really feel completely different to look at — no less than to Individuals — than they’d have six months in the past. That’s as a result of they hit a lot nearer to dwelling now. It would sound off-the-wall to explain “Eagles of the Republic” as an “entertaining” saga of repression, however the central character is a fictional Egyptian film star, and for its first hour or so the movie is vivid and humorous because it invitations us to revel within the perks and gossipy vainness of his charmed however flawed existence.

George Fahmy (Fares Fares) is a veteran actor, referred to as the “Pharoah of the Display,” who carries himself just like the legend he’s. He’s tall, with glittering darkish eyes and a hawkish profile; he appears like Liam Neeson, with a touch of Harry Dean Stanton’s hangdog melancholy. He’s the number-one box-office star in Egypt, who acts in the whole lot from status dramas to movies with titles like “The First Egyptian in Area.” He’ll throw his weight round arguing with the nation’s Muslim censor board (who by no means met a film they couldn’t attempt to neuter), and his personal life is a litany of scandalous privilege. He occupies a lavish condo and has a mistress, Donya (Lyne Khoudri), who’s half his age and appears like a trend mannequin. (She’s an aspiring actor.)

George takes what he desires, however there’s a saddened undertow to him that’s not exhausting to see. Hidden beneath baseball cap and sun shades, he takes clandestine journeys to the pharmacy to buy Viagra. He’s separated from his spouse (Donia Massoud) and has a loving however more and more awkward relationship along with his son, Ramy (Suhaib Nashwan), who attends the American College in Cairo. (When the 2 have drinks and Ramy brings alongside the lady he’s relationship, he has to verify his father doesn’t hit on her.) Fares Fares is a forceful actor who dramatizes George’s movie-star vainness from the within out. After which, as he’s gliding by means of life on his cloud of entitlement, he will get a name asking him to star in a film commissioned by the Egyptian authorities.

It is going to be a biopic in regards to the nation’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who got here to energy in 2014 after having staged a army coup. That’s when he toppled Mohamed Morsi, who in 2012 had turn into Egypt’s first democratically elected chief. (Morsi’s rise was propelled by the protest actions of the Arab Spring.) Sisi, who remains to be in energy, turned a textbook autocrat, presiding over a army dictatorship. “Eagles of the Republic” is a saga of life underneath that regime. We see harmless folks arrested for posting a “treasonous” thought on Fb, and characters perpetually consult with the “they” who’re hovering over the whole lot — they that means the regime. They don’t seem to be to be messed with.

Tarik Saleh, the movie’s writer-director, is of Swedish-Egyptian descent and relies in Sweden, which is why he was capable of make “Eagles of the Republic” as an open indictment of life underneath Sisi. That is the ultimate movie in Saleh’s “Cairo trilogy,” after the drug thriller “The Nile Hilton Incident” (2017) and the Muslim clerical-school corruption drama “Cairo Conspiracy” (2022), and for some time it’s an absorbing story.

When George learns that he’s being requested to star in a chunk of state-actioned propaganda, a film that will likely be entitled “Will of the Individuals,” he balks. He’s no fan of Egypt’s dictatorship — and moreover, he says, how may a star of his look and stature be requested to play Sisi, who is brief and bald? However the actual fact that he’d elevate these objections, in his common high-maintenance means, signifies that he’s a bit naïve. The Sisi regime isn’t asking George to star on this film; it’s telling him. As he grudgingly submits to the task, entering into his khaki army costume bedecked with medals, we’re fairly sure that we’re going to see a parable of what occurs when movie-star hubris runs into the buzzsaw of authoritarian mercilessness.

For some time, that’s simply what it’s. There’s a person on the set named Dr. Mansour, performed by Amr Waked (who’s like a quieter Dennis Farina), and he’s the official who’s there to verify the whole lot comes out in a means that will likely be Sisi-approved. Early on he tells George, “You’re giving a nasty efficiency,” and it’s not as a result of he’s abruptly turned drama critic. George’s enactment of Sisi’s rise to energy is just too exaggerated, too cartoonish — and that’s as a result of it’s George’s means of not giving himself over totally to the function. It’s his means of resisting.

Then George will get invited to a proper dinner on the dwelling of the minister of protection (Tamim Heikal). There’s a gaggle of presidency higher-ups there, who consult with themselves as “eagles of the republic” — that’s, they’re there to survey and defend the nation. However they’re actually defending Sisi and his corrupt rule. By this level George has found out that he must play the sport, and he is aware of the best way to do it. However when he meets the minister’s imperious spouse, the Sorbonne-educated, Western-oriented Suzanne (Zineb Triki), a hazard bell goes off. He’s quickly having an affair together with her, which appears a critically dumb factor to do. We predict we all know, in our intestine, the place the film is headed.

However we don’t. George will get requested to provide a speech as an extra demonstration of his loyalty, and he agrees. The speech occurs proper in entrance of Sisi, at a sunlit army parade to commemorate the troopers who died preventing Israel within the Yom Kippur (a.okay.a. Ramadan) Struggle. George provides the speech. And that’s when one thing occurs. A spasm of violence. There was a plot towards Sisi, within the type of a half-baked army coup, and George is correct within the thick of it. He has been used…in some way.  

The “in some way” is what we wish to know. However that’s the place the film, to our shock, falls utterly aside. Nearly the whole lot that occurs after the coup try is indirect, complicated, garbled, head-scratching. What occurred to Saleh’s filmmaking? Main as much as this second, it was meticulous. Did he depart a bunch of scenes on the cutting-room ground? In the course of the movie’s second half, we are able to piece collectively what occurs (sort of), however not in a means that makes whole sense, or that’s in any respect dramatically satisfying. And but the film had been figuring out such a significant and related theme: the stakes of making an attempt to placate a regime of ruthless energy. “Eagles of the Republic” loses the thread of its story, however much more disappointingly it leaves these stakes hanging.