Black Gold – review

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. Touted as the Arab breakthrough into the international cinema arena, Black Gold pits Mark Strong and Antonio Banderas against each other as warring emirs torn between the traditional ways and modern temptations: A Prophet's Tahar Rahim plays the next generation – son of the former, but hostage to the latter – whose bookish charisma not only wins him the attentions of a pouting Freida Pinto, but also unites the peninsula's warring tribes and stands up for a humane, tolerant form of Islam, too. But despite its honourable intentions, Black Gold hits the ground with a terrible clunking thud, its broken-English dialogue squeezing the life out of it practically from the off. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud injects proceedings with many a dramatic camel charge, and laces them with vistas of shimmering sand dunes and picturesque local attire, but he can do little about the fundamentally creaky nature of the enterprise. Black Gold feels like it could have been made in the 1950s; we have come to expect a little more from our blockbusters.