Movie Review

Riz Ahmed confronts his health and heritage in Mogul Mowgli

Riz Ahmed in Mogul Mowgli.

Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing

Actor/writer/producer Riz Ahmed has had a long road toward success. After spending years as a rapper under the name Riz MC and working in smaller productions, he finally broke out in 2014’s Nightcrawler, followed shortly by his Emmy-winning role in HBO’s The Night Of in 2016 and his Oscar-nominated role in 2020’s Sound of Metal.

Now, he’s back with his most personal role yet in Mogul Mowgli.

Ahmed plays Zed (Riz Ahmed), a British Pakistani rapper who’s gained a nice following because of his highly political songs about his heritage and Muslims in general. With a European tour looming with another big rapper, he seems about ready for his breakout moment. But on a visit back home with his parents, he starts experiencing muscle weakness, leading him to a diagnosis that may derail his whole career before it even gets started.

Written by Ahmed and Bassam Tariq and directed by Tariq, the film takes on a surreal quality as Zed starts to deteriorate mentally, having a series of hallucinations and dreams. Even in his lucid moments, Zed starts to question much about his life, including his commitment to his faith, his Pakistani heritage, his influence on other rappers, and whether him choosing rap for a career is cultural appropriation.

Even before his health issues crop up, Zed is having identity issues. At a family dinner and in a chance meeting with a fan, Zed is called out for being somewhat estranged from his heritage. He goes by Zed, not his real name of Zaheer, to better fit in with the rest of society, and he has fallen out of practice with Muslim customs, alienating some despite the obvious connections in his songs.

The film is unapologetic about immersing itself in Pakistani/Muslim culture with little to no explanation for other audiences. They drop a number of Islamic terms like sunnah, haram, makruh, and bismillah without giving anything other than some context clues. Zed also has a song called “Toba Tek Singh” that many viewers wouldn’t know was a city in Pakistan unless they looked it up. Even the title of the film goes unexplained; for the record, it’s from a song by Riz MC’s group Swet Shop Boys that contrasts different sides of their identity.

Ahmed obviously took much inspiration from being a real-life rapper, as the wordplay of Zed’s songs is fantastic. However, the speed of his rapping and the unfamiliar references he uses could result in confusion for some viewers. A screener had subtitles that greatly aided my comprehension, but theater moviegoers may not be so lucky.

In a quirk of fate/scheduling, Ahmed has released two movies in a row where he plays a musician with a health condition that prevents him from pursuing his music. While the characters and their conditions are much different, the mental anguish that each goes through is similar. For my money, Ahmed’s performance in Sound of Metal had a bigger impact, but anyone who sees Mogul Mowgli first might disagree.

Mogul Mowgli will be a different kind of movie experience for many viewers thanks to its very specific cultural references and symbolism. But at its core it’s about things to which everyone can relate like family, self-doubt, and more, making it a universal story.

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Mogul Mowgli is playing at Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra.

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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