‘Kandahar’ review: Gerard Butler and Ric Roman Waugh produce a fun, thrilling and heartfelt ride
The actor and director tandem are getting good at making action films together.
When we first meet CIA operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler), he’s completing a very dangerous mission in Iran. It’s the kind of mission that is a big deal if successful, but also one that forces your superiors to forget you ever existed if things go wrong. Nothing like attaching a small gadget to the Wi-Fi inside a nuclear reactor plant to blow up the bad guy’s big weapon lair to get the wrong people chasing you down.
When a reporter is kidnapped and her family is threatened, those covert CIA operative mission details are exposed to every bad egg with a gun in Iran. Along with a translator, Mo (Navid Negahban), meant to aid his next mission, Harris now has to blast through 400 miles of deadly terrain to reach an airport in Kandahar for a plane that obviously won’t wait there forever.
Director Ric Roman Waugh and Butler (also a producer here) have honed their craft creating these B-movie delights; Kandahar is their third collaboration, following Angel Has Fallen and Greenland. Please don’t walk into the theater expecting high class cinema or the fanciest piece of art in town. This is the kind of movie that doesn’t waste too much time on subplots or messy distractions, instead planting us in a 16 Blocks-esque sprint to the finish line.
It’s not like screenwriter Mitchell LaFortune doesn’t insert a few real life morals and unfortunate truths into the script. Kandahar says a lot with only a little when it comes to the relationships soldiers from America must forge overseas with the most dangerous groups of people--all in the hopes of future peace or simple survival. Harris and Mo’s lives become dependent on bartering with Taliban oppositionists who aren’t much better than their enemy.
But LaFortune, Waugh, and Butler all know what the audience is here for: pure, unbridled action. Without suffocating the viewer in endless explosions and gunfights, well-constructed and intense sequences drive the juice here. A face-off in the dark of the desert night throttles, while a car chase through the sand near the end doesn’t let up. Inside two hours, Kandahar provides compelling entertainment that resists preaching and doesn’t bore.
We’re in Butler’s wheelhouse. He gets better in this genre as he ages too, and getting to use his native Scotland tongue is a bonus. Say what you want about his choices after Zack Snyder’s 300, but he’s very good (and thoroughly enjoys) playing these imperfect heroes. Tom has a marriage that is on the verge of breaking and a teenage daughter he barely knows, thus filling the Butler protagonist quota from his other films. It’s better that way here, because the movie didn’t need a subplot where we see the wife and kid at home looking sad and stressed.
Action films need a mainly one-track mind. Slow down in parts, so a gulp of soda and a few handfuls of popcorn can be digested, but keep us checking our own six for the duration of the feature. Waugh’s films (The Rock in Snitch among them) aren’t the ones that the Academy will honor next year, but they fit in well with the canon of my youth. You could take Kandahar out of 2023 and plop it down in 1999 quite easily, and I love that.
Negahban adds a lot to the film in a big way, much like he did with Chris Hemsworth’s in 2018’s underrated war film, 12 Strong. Carrying a voice with gravity to spare, he forms a nice bond with Butler, much like the one Jake Gyllenhaal had with the great Dar Salim in last month’s Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. While the plots of the two films are similar, Kandahar carries enough subtle differences to stand out.
We get to know Harris and Mo a little more with each plot point that is reached, like painting in a face and heart slowly instead of quickly. It’s not imperative to know everything about a character in the first 30 minutes. Provide a relatable connection, but withhold the rest until it means something. Harris’s past with translators and Mo’s secret rage carry a force here that bound me to their plight.
Hat tip to the diabolical Ali Fazal for giving Waugh’s film a worthy adversary for the dynamic duo. He’s the punk rock star of this action opera, storming across the sandy desert on a motorcycle; a Motocross-powered, Armani-dressed assassin aiming to stop Harris and Mo before they can escape. Bahador Foladi puts in fine work as another guy with a band of henchmen trying to put the impostor and traitor down for good.
A lively soundtrack and score heighten the events, and keep the pulse awake. Add it all up and you have a pretty good two-hour serving of escapist fun with a soulful current. Don’t compare Ritchie and Waugh’s films; devour them both on a warm Memorial Day weekend.
Photo Credit: Open Road