Two bumbling hoods in Casablanca are charged with disposing of a corpse in Kamal Lazraq’s disappointing thriller.
There’s only a limited amount of love you can extend to a film that spins out a yarn on the back of a tricky situation whose “solution” should be obvious to anyone with even the most basic foresight. Casablanca, modern day, and two petty hoods, father and son, become more than mere middlemen for a job involving a simple duffing up and kidnapping.
When their influential mark, whose moral unscrupulousness in the illegal dog-fighting scene has been called into question, accidentally dies in transit, the two hapless men are charged with disposing of the corpse. For them, it’s not such a simple task, as every idea they come up with ends up with them being caught and locked up for murder. And part of writer-director Kamal Lazraq’s simplistic thesis is the notion that no crime goes unpunished.
Yet despite efforts to rack up tension as absurdity levels as they just cannot get rid of this stiff, it never feels convincing that they, for some reason, don’t arrive at what is a fairly obvious eureka moment much earlier than they do. As a director of actors, a cultivator of mood and someone with an eye for striking locations, Lazraq has certainly got some juice. But as a piece of compelling and coherent narrative filmmaking, Hounds is unfortunately a fun beginning, a silly ending and with a mid-section that’s missing in action.
Published 13 Jun 2024
Found some plaudits when it played at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
There’s some superficial fun to be had from the various encounters, but not a lot makes sense.
The contrived situation kills it, but it at least doesn’t outstay its welcome.
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