[JP] In Alon Gur Arye’s new comedy, Mossad, which is opening throughout Israel on June 27 and is inspired by gag-filled American movies such as Airplane and Top Secret, all hell breaks loose – about every 30 seconds.The chord bridge at the entrance to Jerusalem collapses on top of a man drinking coffee on the light rail. People are told that security has been breached at a reception but that they are under the protection of Israeli forces, and the guests all scream and run for cover, as the string quartet plays the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – one of the many movie references in the film.
The evil organization that kidnaps an American tech billionaire is called RBG, which stands for “really bad guys” – or could it be US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And when RBG kidnaps the befuddled, disgraced Mossad operative at the center of the story, Guy Moran (Tsahi Halevi, who is so handsome he looks like a special effect, but believably dim), along with a CIA agent, Linda Harris (Efrat Dor), the evil masterminds live-stream themselves to Mossad headquarters, threatening to behead their captives.
But after a moment, they’re shaking their heads in disbelief when the elderly Mossad head (Ilan Dar) demands to be sent a very 20th century videotape of the hostages holding newspapers. “Who can even find videotape anymore? Nobody reads a newspaper!” yell the bad guys.
These are just a tiny fraction of the jokes in Mossad and this broad, slapstick comedy is a dream come true for Gur Arye. He’s a quiet, sweet guy who everyone in the Tel Aviv cafe where we meet would probably guess is an engineer or a computer programmer, and not the director the film which is advertised on every bus and billboard all over Israel. They certainly wouldn’t guess that the soft-spoken Gur Arye would have managed to get two great directors – David Zucker (Airplane, the Naked Gun franchise) and Avi Nesher, the veteran Israeli director whose films all feature a great deal of humor – to be his mentors on the project.
“Everyone in Israel wants to do dramas,” said Gur Arye. “So I wanted to do spoofs, parodies. And I wanted to spoof something very Israeli.”
Movie trailer at this link.