The Belgian duo of Moroccan origin, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, made perhaps the best film so far about the time of the infamous so-called The Islamic caliphate, which spread fear throughout the territory of Iraq and Syria for several years. The duo called Adil and Billal have already tried their hand in Hollywood by filming the third installment of the “Bad Boys” franchise with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. At the same time, “Rebel” is a war and family drama, a fierce action thriller and a romantic modern rap musical, and this modernist, youthful, at times almost spot-on approach worked brilliantly here.
The film is also very interestingly structured, whose action is non-linear, and we follow the story from the perspective of two brothers and their mother. Everything starts with the television news from Syria, which is followed with excitement by both young and old in Molenbeek, a suburb of Brussels where mostly immigrants from Asia and Africa live. Among them is the young rapper and petty criminal Kamal (Aboubakr Bensaihi), who lives with his 12-year-old brother Nassim and his mother Leila (Lubna Azabal from Incendies in another great role). And at the beginning it seems like another typical social-realist drama about the problem of immigrants in Europe, until first Kamal presents his side of the story as if in a rap musical. Already then we understand that “Rebel” will be a significantly different film than any we have seen before about the war in Syria, and after Kamal goes to Syria with the idea of helping the victims of the war, he will be drawn into the maelstrom of war and will end up among the worst of the worst. .
Nassim, on the other hand, is a boy who sees his older brother as a role model, and while everyone at school sees him as a terrorist because his brother joined ISIL, such an angry, bitter and naive kid will become an easy target for those who recruit children for the Islamic State. In the end, their mother will come to the fore and will be tasked with trying to save the whole situation, if that is even possible. And the film is masterfully directed, in which we have great action scenes that some directors of Hollywood blockbusters would envy, and although at first it may sound incredible and impossible, it is a film that evokes empathy in the viewer.
Despite the fact that the film actually begins with an execution carried out by ISIL, and Karim is among the executioners, we will understand by the end that nothing is black and white. It is a complex action drama that at the same time brilliantly portrays the illusions that young European Arabs who romanticized jihad may have had about this barbaric quasi-state creation, but also the actual situation on the ground. Brutality and unimaginable cruelty, a shocking reality that hits all the senses and everything that we see here, is even scarier and more gruesome than any normal person’s idea of that half-world.
At its very core, “Rebel” is a story about a family that will be completely destroyed by a cruel war and perhaps naive, youthful illusions, but also a film that, despite its duration of more than two hours, holds attention from the first to the last second and is a template from which a mini-series could be made without any problems. Although maybe on paper this whole story doesn’t sound convincing or like something from which it is possible to make something convoluted, Adil and Bilall managed to pull off the practically impossible. To make a modern, dynamic, exciting and poignant, yet emotional and empathetic drama about modern anti-heroes, which is perhaps the best ISIL film I’ve seen so far.