If you’ve ever walked through an international film market — particularly at Cannes or Berlin — then you’ve seen the country-themed booths that boast about the modern production facilities and beautiful shooting locations in Macedonia or Luxembourg or any other such places that aren’t exactly known for their blockbuster cinema. Rupert Wyatt’s “Desert Warrior,” which first rolled cameras all the way back in the fall of 2021(!) with a reported budget of $150 million(!!), is essentially just the most expensive version of those kiosks ever made. 

Conceived as an epic showcase for the Saudi film industry, this gorgeous but oppressively basic adventure aspires to reimagine “Lawrence of Arabia” as an MBS-approved infomercial for the natural beauty and nascent infrastructure that’s waiting for you within and around the planned city of NEOM, a place that already has a long history of human rights violations even though it only began construction in 2017. (In fairness, what top-notch production hub wasn’t the product of mass displacements and environmental devastation?)

And, by that measure, I suppose that it succeeds. Despite being almost as generic as its title would imply, and every bit as retrograde as its casting would suggest (brace for the extremely white Sharlto Copley as a ruthless seventh century warrior named Jalabzeen), “Desert Warrior” is semi-undeniable proof that Saudi Arabia is capable of producing multiplex-worthy spectacle. Now it will just have to withstand multiplex-worthy reviews.

While “Desert Warrior” hinges on a pre-Islamic battle fought between Arab tribes and the Persian Sasanian Empire in Southern Iraq (a conflict sometimes referred to as the War of the Camel’s Udder, and one that’s remembered as a crucial inflection point in the history of Persian rule), such local flavor is quickly flattened into a backstop for the production’s Western pedigree.

That pedigree starts with Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Captive State”), an extremely talented visual storyteller whose ability to elevate studio material continues to bump up against the low ceilings of his projects, and it obviously continues with the casting of Marvel Cinematic Universe star Anthony Mackie in what amounts to the lead role, a nameless, vaguely accented bandit who gets swept up in a fight against the tyranny of the concubine-mad Emperor Kisra (Ben Kingsley, delivering a one-scene performance straight out of “Dune”).

But the film’s dislocated cultural origins are most clearly illustrated by its story, which owes less — a lot less — to ancient traditions of Arabic literature than it does to the likes of David Lean, Sergio Leone, and Peter Jackson. Lensed against the sandswept mountains of Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk Province (as immediately stunning a backdrop as the remote dunes of Shaanxi provided to Wong Kar Wai’s “Ashes of Time”), “Desert Warrior” starts with the verve and simplicity of a classic Western, as King Numan (Ghassan Massoud) and the beautiful Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart) flee the Emperor’s decree that all tribal leaders must surrender their daughters to him. Persian forces — led by the enforcer Jalabzeen, who Copley plays with his usual relish — have chased the exiled royals to the ends of the earth, and so King Numan has no choice but to beg an eager bandit for help. 

The bandit, henceforth referred to as “the Bandit,” has little in the way of purpose or personality, but Mackie does what he can to infuse the character with the roguish appeal of a young Han Solo, even if the film’s script — credited to Wyatt, Erica Beeney, and David Self — would rather build toward its own Battle of the Five Armies than make time for levity, or charm, or any kind of discernibly humanizing frisson between the people we meet along the way. Anyway, the Bandit leads his new clients to the safety of the Shaybani people (personified by a noble leader named Hani, played by Sami Bouajila), whose initial skepticism gives way to ride-or-die loyalty as Princess Hind steps into her destiny as the one person capable of uniting the desert tribes against the Emperor. 

“Let me tell you about true honor,” she proclaims in one of the few — but typically generic — lines of dialogue that speaks to the moral valence of the war she’s waging. “It isn’t a weapon, it’s a journey.” And that journey is tedious as hell, as “Desert Warrior” abruptly downshifts from a sharp-eyed Western to an epic as broad and flat as the sabkhas of the Rub’ al Khali.

From the end of its first act to the start of its final battle, the movie is almost entirely devoted to scenes of Princess Hind and her underwritten friends combing the countryside in order to rally people to their cause as Dan Levy’s “Interstellar”-adjacent score further destabilizes any sense of where we are in space and time. We learn nothing about the Bandit, the Princess, the Shaybani medicine woman who comes to her aid (Lammis Ammar), or any of the other people fighting for their freedom; that Jalabzeen betrays a moment of reluctance towards his master’s crusade makes him the film’s most detailed character by default. There are camels in this movie that deserve higher billing than much of the human cast.

Mackie’s blue robes continue to pop against the orange sand, and Wyatt’s vivid compositions increasingly evoke the mystical opulence of Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” and/or the cartoon majesty of Zack Snyder’s “300” as the film continues. The Emperor’s battle arena, for example, is a marvel of moody set design, its barbarity brought to life by the throngs of people crowding to watch the action from atop its grated roof. But it soon begins to feel like the massive army of extras, craftspeople, and camels that are summoned before us have no greater purpose than to be seen by Guillermo Garza’s camera. 

We do see them — a “Send Help”-worthy dollop of hilariously bad animal CGI towards the end isn’t enough to distract from the practical tactility of the film’s sets and setpieces, the latter of which are highlighted by an excellent horseback chase. And yet, such old-fashioned Hollywood muscle is wasted on a movie that spends the vast majority of its runtime flexing directly into the lens. The movie’s endless middle is so dull and uneventful that “Desert Warrior” can’t help but belie its true purpose at every turn, as whatever momentum its hyper-fictionalized story was able to conjure at the start begins to sour into the stuff of a glorified commercial. The film’s scenic pace and dispassionate plotting eventually do less to evoke “Lawrence of Arabia” than they do the Delta ads that play on every seatback TV before takeoff, even after you’ve been stuck on the runway for hours — propaganda for something that you’re already struggling to enjoy. 

The clear promise of a “Return of the King”-worthy melee, complete with digital war elephants, is reason enough to keep watching, but Wyatt — whose clever use of silence and elliptical approach to editing lend even the dullest moments a singular hint of sharpness — struggles to differentiate the climactic battle from those of the movies that “Desert Warrior” is copying. Of course, that’s exactly what the money behind this movie was hoping to accomplish with it. The point wasn’t to make something new and inimitable, the point was to showcase that Saudi Arabia is a ready, willing, and extremely rich host country for all of the usual crap that has gotten too expensive to make well in America. 

And it is! Sure, creative interference from the new leadership at MBC Studios threatened to prevent the movie from ever seeing the light of day, and the fact that it’s being dumped into theaters several years after it was shot doesn’t seem to bode well, but there’s no way David Ellison won’t be salivating like a dog when he sees what NEOM might be able to offer his new studio empire. Is there honor in that? Perhaps not, but as the Bandit says, “Honor is for fools.” Like every line in “Desert Warrior,” it feels lifted from somewhere else. But here, in this context, nothing could sound more sincere.

Grade: C-

Vertical will release “Desert Warrior” in theaters on Friday, April 24.

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