Hamad, Hassan and the General. Think Steve Buscemi, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I was drawn to the movie by its description in the film guide for the 2018 Seattle International Film Festival:

After one of them receives a windfall inheritance, a group of fiesty [sic] elderly men escape their assisted living home and hit the streets of Dubai to explore the dreams they had all but forgotten in this tender comedy-adventure that proves you are never too old to discover life's joys.

In Hollywood, I figured, it would be a forgettable, dispiriting film with a few elderly actors romping around, making non-poignant jokes about aging, and, for a scene, dressing up in ridiculous hip-hop fashions and walking in slow-mo toward the camera. But at SIFF? From United Arab Emirates? I had confidence it would be better than that. 

Nope. Worse.

Everything wrapped up nicely
“On Borrowed Time” (Arab title “Shabab Sheyab” or “Old Youth”) borrows the clichés of Hollywood movies—including that hip-hop, slow-mo walk toward the camera—without its century of professional storytelling. It’s a bad combo. Thirty minutes in, I silently chastised myself: “Dude, you really have to check out the trailers before you drag your wife to these things.”

It begins well. An old man in voiceover talks about the stars and the moon aligning and making the conditions perfect for writing. And what he’s writing? It's good. I assumed he was a writer, a professional, now living the last years of his life in an assisted-living facility in Dubai. I wanted more of it. But that angle disappears almost immediately.

The voiceover belongs to Abu Hassan (Sad Al-Faraj), who has an expressive face and a twinkle in his eye, and would be played by Morgan Freeman in the Hollywood version. He’s the one continually urging his three assisted-living friends to make the most of the rest of their lives. Basically: Get busy living or get busy dying. The three friends are:

• General Talaat (Salloum Haddad), who still gets up early and shaves every morning, and would be played by Tommy Lee Jones.
• The Pharmacist (Mansoor Alfeeli), a good-natured germaphobe who wears rubber gloves and takes too many pills. (Dick Van Dyke, maybe?)
• Abu Hamad (Marei Halyan), affable and wheelchair-bound, who still dreams of making a recording. (I could see Steve Buscemi playing older.)

When lawyers reveal that the General has inherited 50 million dirham (about $12 million) from a distant relative, the four, plus their youthful caretaker, Khalid (Fouad Ali), go out to claim the money. The law office is closed, but in the parking garage, look, there’s a recording studio. Some subterfuge is necessary to get Hamad to the front of the line, but he makes his recording—which, of course, will be left at the club/disco the Pharmacist always wanted to go to (the one for which they wear the hip-hop clothes), and will then, of course, wind up on the radio, where, of course, it will become a hit. For a minute they celebrate. Then that storyline is dropped.

This happens with all the plot points. There’s a thing that needs to happen, it does, it's dropped. It’s always obvious what needs to happen and it’s always easy to make it so. Hamad should sing, the Pharmacist shouldn’t be such a germaphobe, and Khalid should get together with the pretty doctor, Ruqayyeh (Layla Abdullah). Yes, yes, and yes. Problems solved.

Ed Rooney lives
The biggest such problem is reuniting the General with his estranged son. Indeed, the whole inheritance thing was a fake, a subterfuge concocted by Abu Hassan to bring father and son together. Initially, it fails. When the two meet in a mall, the General curses his son and slaps him. When Hassan tries to intervene, he has a heart attack and dies. Road to hell/good intentions.

But in the aftermath, with the subterfuge revealed, the General’s heart softens, and his son forgives, and the grandson wants nothing more than to sit on grandpa’s lap. Meanwhile, the manager of the assisted care facility, who, for a time, chased after the four as if he were Principal Rooney in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is fired and mocked by the residents on his way out. 

“On Borrowed Time” is dreadful. Don’t go expecting any insight into UAE. Expect Hollywood-lite.