Yosra, Mai Ezz El Din and Iman El Sayed take over for Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lopez and Wanda Sykes respectively in this remake of Monster in Law.
Nada (Ezz El Din) is a housekeeper at a hotel who works around the clock to save up enough money to open a restaurant. While working, she meets Amr (Nour), a hunky guy, who takes one glimpse at her (very fake) wig and French maid outfit and asks her to be his girlfriend. Soon enough, they're back in Cairo meeting his newly laid-off, neurotic mother Liqaa (Yosra) and her assistant Wafaa (El Sayyed). Confident that they’ll get along swimmingly, the hunk proposes then jets off on a work trip leaving mummy dearest and his bride-to-be living together in a state of war.
The question poses itself: why remake a seven-year-old, mediocre film if you're going to stick so closely to the source material? The whole point of remakes is that all the faults are blatant, making it that much easier to evade them. What Game Over does is ‘Egyptian-ise’ the source material by amplifying anything that could possibly be construed as humorous until the joke’s practically being screamed in your face and is no longer funny. People hitting each other is not going to make anyone laugh the 50th time it happens, especially not when the score is as subtle as a cue card dictating the expected response to the scene. Slapstick can be good in comedy, hilarious even, but when used sparingly and if there’s one thing this film lacks, it’s a sense of balance.
Another problem with the film is that we don’t know anything about Amr. Nour is probably on screen for a total of five minutes which you’ll spend cringing because his lines, and delivery, are beyond cheesy. We were constantly asking ourselves why Nada cared so much; what does she know about him that makes her put up with his mother’s abuse? It’s a complete mystery and a very someday-my-prince-will-come attitude to romance that doesn’t jive with what we know about Nada as a career-oriented woman who doesn’t fall in love easily.
Ezz El Din and Yosra are adequate - they fare far better than Nour anyway - but they aren’t helped by the script. El Sayed, however, gets better material to work with and frequently cracked up the audience with her one-liners. Did we mention that Yosra and Ezz El Din, in between all the slapping, get into a shaabi sing off? An auto tuned one no less.
The best that can be said about the film is that it isn’t as bad as its catastrophe trailer suggests. The audience during the screening were laughing their heads off but at this point it seems that audiences are willing to comply and laugh at anything.
