7 Dogs

What happens when you inject Hollywood blood into the veins of Arabic cinema? A cinematic coup that stakes a claim on cultural soft power. After headline-grabbing football acquisitions, Saudi Arabia seems to be aiming for global box office dominance by mounting a vanity project. Orchestrated by ‘Bad Boys’ Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the Arabic blockbuster, 7 Dogs, lands on our shores in the form of an official Hindi dub.

A global cartel called 7 Dogs. A super-strong drug called Pink Lady. Good guys. Bad guys. And a billion-dollar budget. Make that billions. And there’s your Big Arabic Blockbuster, studded with international stars and locations, its India release buoyed by the presence of Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt. I must confess that I went into the movie mostly to see what the two Bollywood superstars would do in a film like this one, whose plot-line resembles countless films they’ve been part of. Clearly, the Belgian-Moroccan director duo of two of the ‘Bad Boys’ capers– as well as a couple of episodes in the enjoyable series ‘Ms Marvel’– are capable of mounting films on scale, creating kinetic set-pieces with a high degree of entertainment.

A trivia question for the ages: what film has Monica Bellucci, Giancarlo Esposito, Martin Lawrence, Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt in its cast? The answer is 7 Dogs, a Saudi Arabian action thriller by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the directing duo behind the last two Bad Boys movies. The internationalism is more or less the point. Admittedly, there’s always a cheap thrill in watching your favourite faces in a snazzy global production, complete with explosions and gunfights. It’s an old tradition across media. Think of it as the cinematic equivalent of an all-stars charity match — sans the charity.