The Infidel
For a comedy which venerates unity, tolerance and understanding, The Infidel does a fine job of excluding secular audiences with its Jewish and Muslim faith in-jokes.
For a comedy which venerates unity, tolerance and understanding, The Infidel does a fine job of excluding secular audiences with its Jewish and Muslim faith in-jokes.
More troubling, screenwriter David Baddiel takes a smart dramatic conceit and goes nowhere with it, trotting out tired cultural stereotypes as easy targets for this toothless satire.
There's no energy to Josh Appignanesi's direction.
He relies completely on likable leading man Omid Djalili to wring laughs out of thin air.
You won't be the only one crying 'Oi vey' in the darkness of your local multiplex, despairing how slowly 104 joyless minutes can pass.
Doting husband Mahmud Nasir (Djalili) is not the most observant Muslim but he is fiercely proud of his family including wife Saamiya (Archie Panjabi) and son Rachid (Amit Shah), who is poised to marry Uzma (Soraya Radford), the daughter of a radical, hook-handed Islamic cleric (Igal Naor).
Searching through his late mother's belongings, Mahmud discovers a nasty surprise on his birth certificate.
'You were adopted at the age of two weeks from the Whitechapel branch of the Waifs And Strays Society,' confirms Mrs Keyes (Miranda Hart) at the local registry office.
She also reveals that Mahmud's birth name was Solly Shimsillewitz and - horror upon horrors - his parents were Jewish.
Unable to tell his loved ones the truth, for fear of scuppering Rachid's impending nuptials, Mahmud solicits advice from Jewish cab driver, Lenny Goldberg (Richard Schiff), who helps Mahmud to swaps his Qu'ran for the Torah and track down his birth father.
Meanwhile, Saamiya fears her husband's odd behaviour might be the result of self-doubt about his sexuality.
'Come here and show me how un-gay you are, you big hetero, sexual beast!' she purrs.
The Infidel is a missed opportunity.
Baddiel is a skillful writer and could have exposed the prejudices and ignorance of multi-cultural Britain with coruscating observations that cut to the funny bone.
Instead, he mires bumbling Mahmud at the centre of a lifeless narrative and then strains credibility with a scatterlogical subplot about the fate of a long lost 1980s electro-pop singer.
Dialogue doesn't trip naturally off characters' tongues - 'The next time I need a dose of Muslim misogyny, I'll call Hanif Kureishi' - and the denouement is a damp squib.
Baddiel is losing his sense of humour not his religion.
Release Date: Friday 9 April 2010
Certificate: 15
Runtime: 105mins
