Mark Reviews Movies: MOSUL (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 25, 2020

Writer/director Matthew Michael Carnahan throws us right into the fighting in Mosul, a dramatization of the battle for the eponymous Iraqi city against ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, or Daesh, depending on one's preference. The movie, Carnahan's first as a director, opens with a firefight in an abandoned café. We don't know who these people are, why they're in this specific location, or for what specifically they're fighting. We just know there are the good guys, the local cops taking cover behind the bar, and the bad guys, the members of Daesh (as they'll be referred to here, since that's the preferred label of the protagonists) peppering the place with bullets.

Carnahan's initial vision of war is that simple—and rightly so, perhaps, in this situation. The bad guys are human monsters in more ways than the filmmaker can portray in less than two hours, but he shows us some of the more horrific points.

A group of civilians, trying to flee a certain part of the city, become targets for Daesh snipers, who refuse to give up the awful strategic advantage of having these people around—to use them as human shields against the local police forces and the American military. Following one rescue mission, a woman reveals that she's pregnant, and the team of specialized police looks over to the Daesh fighter, now dead, who had been holding the woman and her daughter captive. One member of the SWAT team that serves as the story's focus shows the newcomer to the group a video of a man being beheaded. One of their fallen comrades kept it on his cellphone, to watch whenever he forgot why he was fighting.

Also on that phone, though, are photos the cop took of himself, proudly posing with Daesh members that he killed. That's the proof he was doing something—maybe not something "good" but something that could lead to good. That vital distinction becomes the ultimate point of Carnahan's view of this fight. These men don't necessarily engage in honorable combat. They kill prisoners of war. One shoots an unarmed Daesh fighter where he stands, with his hands raised in surrender. Their leader notices the new guy trying to put an enemy, drowning in his own blood after being shot, out of his misery, and he simply says, "Let him suffer."

That's how these men, members of the Nineveh Province SWAT team fight, fight, and Carnahan neither sugarcoats nor glorifies it. This is war against a group trying to inflict as much pain and suffering on a country's population as possible, under the guise of religious righteousness. The main characters are doing what and whatever they have to do in order to put an end to this terror.

The running question of this movie, although it seems obvious given the antagonists and the stakes, is why these police officers are still fighting this war, even as Daesh has sensed defeat and has begun the process of abandoning the city and the country. Their mission, we eventually learn, is going against orders from command.

The main possibility seems to be vengeance—not only for what the enemy has done to Iraq, but also for the police who have been killed by them. Major Jasem (Suhail Dabbach), the team's paternal leader, doesn't say. By the time new recruit Kawa (Adam Bessa) is trusted enough to get a straight answer about the team's central motive, he doesn't care anymore. He just wants to keep fighting and killing.

This story, then, exists in a strange, somewhat distancing world of strategic and moral uncertainty. That's the point, since the team's true motive is kept as a mystery until the very final scene. The intentional omission, framing everything that happens as a moral puzzle that can only be solved with a single piece of information, leaves us wondering what the point of the rest of the movie is, though.

It's engaging to a certain extent, because Carnahan possesses such control of the movie's setpieces, various firefights in assorted parts of the city, and presents an intriguing sense of moral ambiguity, as we watch so much violence and carnage unfold with only a vague, black-and-white understanding of why it's happening. At first, there is only good and bad here, but as Kawa witnesses the team continue to fight an opponent that has more or less accepted defeat, he has to be reminded by one of his teammates, "We're the good guys." The observation is less a certain statement and more a necessary reminder.

As the fighting continues, Kawa becomes more fearsome, more determined, and much more willing to bend or even break the rules, especially when he encounters a supposed friend who betrayed him. The entire team, indeed, begins bending their own rules, leaving their fallen comrades, whom they earlier go out of their way to protect, behind. The fight becomes more necessary than decency or honor. That can come later, when the battle is finished—if it ever is.

The action here proceeds almost nonstop and with precision, which prevents us from asking too many questions or wondering too much about these characters, their actions, and what the purpose of telling this story is, beyond the nearly continuous action. That approach makes Mosul superficially involving, but it's clear Carnahan, not as successfully, is going for something deeper.

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