The Insult

A well-intentioned misfire, The Insult follows city employee Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha) as he raises the ire of a bigoted mechanic (Adel Karam’s Tony Hanna) while attempting to do his job – with the ensuing conflict between the pair paving the way for a long, contentious court case. The Insult immediately faces an uphill battle in terms of capturing one’s interest thanks to Karam’s seriously obnoxious and unlikable protagonist, as filmmaker Ziad Doueiri, working from a script cowritten with Joelle Touma, establishes Tony as a smug, smarmy villain right from the get-go and, eventually, attempts to transform him into a sympathetic figure. (The degree to which this simply doesn’t work is palpable, as it’s as absurd and ridiculous a maneuver as attempting to soften a virulent Ku Klux Klan member.) And although the movie’s initial courtroom encounter is admittedly quite riveting, The Insult progresses into a fairly absurd midsection devoted entirely to Kamel and Tony’s drawn-out and progressively tiresome court case – with the trial’s one-note nature compounded by Doueiri’s decidedly less-than-subtle approach (ie it’s never not completely apparent what Doueiri is attempting to do here in terms of the movie’s political message). The director’s heavy-handed sensibilities ultimately render the film’s few positive attributes moot – this isn’t surprising, certainly, given that Doueiri actually stops the narrative to deliver a history lesson about midway through – and it goes without saying, finally, that The Insult is a misbegotten endeavor that isn’t able to make the searing impact intended by Doueiri.

** out of ****