A Stand of a Worthy Man: Movie Review

A comedy built on misogyny with zero laughs.

There appears to be two different English translations of the title, A Stand of a Worthy Man and A Stand Worthy of Men. I hope A Stand of a Worthy Men is meant to be the more accurate title, since it’s the one that tries to minimize the misogyny you’re about to experience. The “worthy man” in this case is Adel, a man who spent every minute possible by his wife’s hospital bed before she passed away.		2022 Directed by: Ahmed El Gendy Screenplay by: Haitham Dabbour Starring: Sayed Ragab, Maged El-Kidwani, Bayoumi Fouad, and Sherief El Dasouky
This Egyptian comedy is about Adel’s friends who decide they need to go on vacation to make sure that Adel is doing okay. This seems reasonable except we had around a five-minute introduction for each friend. They each had an extremely unfunny vignette about how hilarious it is that these guys are rich assholes who hate their families. The rest of the movie is equally unfunny. I didn’t laugh once in the two hours. Egyptian viewers really liked this movie so I’m going to assume that most of the jokes got lost in the translation or other cultural differences I didn’t pick up on. However, the jokes that didn’t get lost in translation are pure misogyny. One of the men asks the bartender to “give me a drink that will make her not see straight.” Ah, jokes about date rape drugs, super cool. Now on to the plot, which is mostly non-existent. The movie hinges on the premise being fun enough that they don’t need a story. The men are off to a resort which one of them owns but left to a young woman to manage it so he could take care of one of his other businesses which had a chance to survive. The men very rudely discovered that Mahi completely changed the resort around. There’s now a yoga place, a healing centre and customers everywhere. The fact that she turned it from a dying resort to a profit-making business doesn’t matter to them. These are old men, they don’t like any change. There’s a small romance storyline. A younger man who trotted along after the group of friends likes Mahi, he asks her “Do you think you might find a decent man that would relieve you of all this work?” Ah, good, more misogyny. The men aren’t endearing or funny or interesting and nothing that they do is endearing or funny or interesting. Made in the vein of something like Last Vegas, The Bucket List or Wild Hogs, this feels like a two-hour scene of one episode of a sitcom where out-of-touch old men go on vacation.