An action flick starring Mike Tyson?! Sign me up! An action flick featuring Mike Tyson in a small supporting role, but he still kicks a little ass? Sure, I’m game for that, too.
Pharaoh’s War, one of the many loose translations of the film’s Arabic title, Hamlet Pheroun, is a straight Egyptian flick. There’s a good chance that it wasn’t ever meant to be seen in the West, but the inspired casting of Tyson, and strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, most familiar to viewers as one of the actors who portrayed Grogor Clegane in Game of Thrones, opened up new possibilities for sales, so here we are.
Tyson appears early in the movie, as a good guy mercenary leading refugees out of a war torn city in Syria. But, he is intercepted by warlord Frank (Björnsson), who forces all the refugees to become his hostages. That’s an adequate setup for a shitty action flick, but it’s also the last we’ll see of Tyson for a bit.
That’s because the real main character of this movie is Yahya (Amr Saad. Note: I’m using the Anglicized spellings on this flick’s IMDb page, which differ from various articles about this movie, and the film’s subtitles.). Yahya is a former mercenary or criminal of some sort. He would have no connection to the events in Syria, were it not for the fact his estranged ex-wife, Ragdah (Maya Talem), was living there. She managed to escape, but their son, Abdullah (Raby Saad), was one of the civilians snatched by Frank.
Yahya is super pissed about this, and gathers up the old gang of killers for a mission to get his son back. To sweeten the deal for the less enthusiastic members of his would-be team, he claims they are going after a stash of buried loot.
The team is typical of action flicks going back decades. All the way back to 1954’s Seven Samurai, if the internet is to be believed about this movie’s influences. The DNA is certainly there, but at some point tropes become so widespread that it doesn’t matter where they 
originated. The unintentional standout among the group, only because of the massive culture shock one could experience, is the goofy comic relief in Hatatah (Hamdi El-Mirghani). There’s no sugar coating it. He’s a terrorist bomb maker. That’s right. This flick’s Rob Schneider is a bomb maker.
The rest of this flick plays out like countless action flicks. There is an endless amount of gunplay. There are some slick hand to hand combat scenes, some cool parkour, and some Matrix-style moves courtesy of the character Dahab (Egyptian pop star Rubi) and a harness. Björnsson hams it up and speaks English in an often unintelligible accent, which doesn’t matter since this film is 99% Arabic. As for Tyson…who wants to be the guy who tells him he can’t act? He’s clunky and his line readings are poor. And, horror of horrors, when he beats up on people viewers can see his punches never land. But, it’s Mike Tyson! The guy was a wrecking ball in the 1980s and ’90s. Surely that counts for something?
Tyson was just the hook for western audiences, unfortunately. He draws in viewers to an otherwise unremarkable action movie by his sheer presence alone. That’s not dishonest, really. It’s just one of the ways the movie business works.
There’s not much special about this movie at all. It doesn’t do anything unexpected. It hits its marks and has satisfying action. What impressed itself the most upon me was the window into a different culture, one that my country has been at loggerheads with for quite a long time now. Watching this, it’s clear that the subtitles left quite a lot out of the translation. Translating cultural nuances is one thing, but it looks like much that could be considered controversial in the States was altered.
There is a lot of stuff referencing the tumult of the Arab Spring, and it can’t be forgotten that the action in this flick takes place in Syria during its civil war. That country just concluded that conflict with the ouster of president Bashar al-Assad. In this movie, his forces come to the aid of Yahya and company in one of the big gunfight set pieces, and I suspect that’s because the government of Egypt supported the Assad regime, and they wouldn’t allow a movie to be made contrary to that. That’s inside baseball that I’m not too familiar with, though, and is indicative of the kind of stuff western audiences will miss.
This is a movie, then, that feels strangely sanitized. The subject matter evokes some strong reactions from characters, but English-language viewers are left guessing, while some scenes hammer home cultural differences, especially in the way the women are treated. The simple stuff presents itself readily. As for that influence from Seven Samurai, that seems something of a stretch, as Yahya’s motivations are never altruistic, and the sequences where he and his team protect a village from Frank is tangential to the actual goal of rescuing a single child. The village just happened to be where they found the bad guy.
Pharaoh’s War is shitty, but it isn’t unwatchable crap. It settles into the Watchability Index at #336, displacing Chernobyl Diaries. If one is into gas station bargain bin DVD movies, this is as fine as any other.