‘Rebel’ Review: An Anti-Radicalization Action Movie That Proves a Surprisingly Effective Blunt Weapon

If the unmarked enemy aircraft, mirrored visors and carefully evasive language of Joseph Kosinksi’s “Top Gun: Maverick” tell us anything, it’s that Hollywood has learned to avoid political specifics in the delivery of grandstanding blockbuster entertainment. So one can be forgiven for coming to “” with hackles raised and offence-o-meters on red alert, as it milks Hollywoodish action-movie thrills from the highly charged scenario of one young Belgian’s recruitment into a Syrian ISIS cell.

At first it seems like it will be a home-front battle, as schoolboy Nassim is summoned from his classroom in Belgium by his mother Leila with some crushing news. An ISIS propaganda video has leaked online showing Nassim’s adored elder brother Kamal , who had felt compelled to abscond to Syria to “do good things,” participating in an execution squad, shooting a kneeling prisoner in the back of the head with the blank-eyed dispassion of a zealot.

With the news of Kamal’s radicalization spreading quickly at school and in the community, Nassim and Leila are shunned. It makes an already truculent and confused Nassim the perfect target for a deviously charismatic local recruiter , who expertly manipulates the boy’s desire to believe his brother is still somehow a hero.

Over the course of its 135-minute sprawl, “Rebel” remains dynamic by weaving a host of standard genre elements into its many subplots. Some map onto the contours of the serious drama better than others: Leila’s anguished, perilous journey to Syria to retrieve her child is tense and believable. But a lovers-on-the-run sequence, involving Kamal and Noor , the enslaved woman assigned to him as a wife, strains credibility, and the film’s knife-turning ending feels like a twist too far.

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