Mousa has a problem. Its main actor, Karim Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, is trapped in a crappy movie.

The settings of the story are not too bad: a gifted but socially-awkward electrical engineer has a tough life at the university. He lives alone with his father and has an interesting relationship going on with him. Yehia (Karim) has a possible love interest(s) (it’s not obvious with Yehia’s shy approach, which makes things more interesting), and as he tries to maneuver those with the guidance of his sympathetic father, things go bad.

Unfortunately, things go bad not just as part of the plot, but also for the whole movie, which flatlines to a dumb terminator-turned-a-good-guy superhero flick. (Spoilers alert)

The bad guys show up for some vague reason, steal money and watches (the father was a watchmaker), run, and let the father die in a fire. Yehia, paralyzed in fear, has to watch his father die. He survives the fire and comes back, sells the house, and decides to live in the lab (the “hut”), and build a termin… sorry, a remotely-controlled robot called Mousa who will avenge his father’s death.

It doesn’t take long before his engineer-woman friend shows up. She hacked Yehia’s computers and knows his secret, but is somehow too dumb to figure out how to fix her car. She convinces Yehiya to go beyond simple revenge for his father into a full vigilante and go after the bad guys. There’s a professor at the university who has some jealousy issues with Yehia also. I’m pretty sure he will become the nemesis, but I won’t know because I stopped watching after the second skirmish between the term… Mousa, and the bad guys.

The robot animations are bad. Not awful, but seem to be a couple of years behind. I’m sure the producers don’t have the budget Hollywood movies do, but I’ve seen better animations made in Blender by college students in their free time. That, however, I can forgive.

What I’m grumpy about is the waste of talent and story. You have a good actor who plays the role beautifully. The character is smart and capable. There’s also a gifted woman who happens to be a hacker. Why not use that raw brain power on the bad guys? Do some more of that flashy matrix-rip-off hacking? Why not develop the complex relationships Yehia has with his peers? Maybe give the father more of a role somehow? Anything is better than the bad guys. They are so flat and boring evil robots would have more personality.

Director Peter Mimi is rushing to get to the juicy action part and leave the “boring” introduction as soon as possible. The problem is that the juice reeks of rip-offs and cheap effects with zero depth. The only good part is the rushed introduction.

Too bad.