Helmer/co-scripter Jean-Jacques Annaud's rep for spectacle over screenplay is again borne out in this overblown yet oddly anemic epic of warring Arabian tribes during the nascent oil boom.
Black Gold
France, Italy, Qatar · 2011
Rated R · 2h 10m
Director Jean-Jacques Annaud
Starring Mark Strong, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto, Tahar Rahim
Genre Adventure, Drama
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On the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s, two warring leaders come face to face. The victorious Nesib, Emir of Hobeika, lays down his peace terms to rival Amar, Sultan of Salmaah. The two men agree that neither can lay claim to the area of no man’s land between them called The Yellow Belt. In return, Nesib adopts Amar’s two boys Saleeh and Auda as a guarantee against invasion. Twelve years later, Saleeh and Auda have grown into young men. Saleeh, the warrior, itches to escape his gilded cage and return to his father’s land. Auda cares only for books and the pursuit of knowledge. One day, their adopted father Nesib is visited by an American from Texas. He tells the Emir that his land is blessed with oil and promises him riches beyond his wildest imagination. Nesib imagines a realm of infinite possibility, a kingdom with roads, schools and hospitals all paid for by the black gold beneath the barren sand. There is only one problem. The precious oil is located in the Yellow Belt.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
There's undoubtedly a good film to be made out of the scramble for oil in the Arabian desert in the 1920s – but this, for all its herculean efforts, is not it.
Ambitious but very tedious and talkatively hackneyed, redeemed just a smidge by the money shots of a swarm of extras on horseback sweeping across the sands.
Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene
There's an enormous amount of perverse pleasure to be had here for those who get off on the annihilation of nuance.
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