Right out of the gate, Ric Roman Waugh’s Kandahar sets up a potentially cataclysmic case of American foreign intervention. The film opens with C.I.A. operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler) destroying a clandestine Iranian nuclear facility with minimal difficulty, and despite his thin cover as an ISP technician. This is the kind of action that could kick off a hot war, but instead things pivot quickly into a more restrained manhunt as the Revolutionary Guards quickly figure out Tom’s true identity and launch a small unit to capture the man as he works a different mission in Afghanistan. With his cover blown, Tom must cross a hostile nation to an evacuation point, avoiding Afghan and Iranian pursuers in equal fashion.
This is the third collaboration between Butler and Waugh, but the slight whimsicality of Angel Has Fallen is nowhere to be found in this more downbeat survival thriller. Yet for a movie that follows a man stuck in a country where U.S. coalition troops have now finally left, Kandahar never conjures the sense of paranoia and fear that it should as Tom desperately tries to avoid detection while relying on the aid of his translator, Mohammad (Navid Negahban), an elderly man who lost his son during the American occupation. That pain is written on the translator’s face, but “Mo” displays no resentment toward Tom as a representative of the Western war machine, further depriving the story of a potentially intriguing source of conflict.
Only once does Kandahar’s action truly feel thrilling, when Tom and Mo drive a commandeered pickup truck down a desert road at night and the former has to use night-vision goggles so they can keep the headlights off to mask their profile. Suddenly, the sound of the wind becomes choppier as an attack helicopter rises over a nearby range, itself flying with no visible lights. This moonlit pas de deux between the vehicles is the kind of uncomplicated but gripping, self-contained scene that Waugh can pull off at his workman-like finest.
But where Kandahar is most intriguing is in the oddly even-handed depiction of both American and Middle-Eastern characters as largely exasperated professionals going about their grisly work because they’re too old to pivot to a different job. For one, Farzad (Bahador Foladi), the Revolutionary Guard officer sent to find Tom, cares more about capturing his target so he can get home to his family than he does about bringing down a man who attacked his country.
On the flipside, Pakistani ISI official Kahil (Ali Fazal) amusingly sees his assignment in Afghanistan as a drag, as the reintroduction of mandatory burqas for women has hampered the fun of using dating apps. These men’s self-centered, quotidian interests humanize them beyond longstanding depictions of Muslim-world officials as murderous psychopaths, and it subtly puts their own morally dubious work on an even plane with Tom’s own clandestine operations.
As for Tom, the character sustains Butler’s latter-day reinvention as a leading man away from a wannabe A-list action star to something more akin to a ’70s character actor who gets leading parts. It’s ironic given the role that 300 played in inspiring the modern Hollywood physique, but in a landscape filled with brutally obtained, for-display-only bodies, Butler has come into his own as a screen presence by embracing a shabbier, more relatable look.
Tom is the latest in a recent string of characters that presents the actor as the sort of man who buys beer based on its ABV and not its quantity of carbohydrates. This isn’t a suave super-spy nor a cold-hearted nationalist, but a man so unremarkable and weary that despite being the only white face for hundreds of miles around he can disappear in a crowd by virtue of his normalcy.
The film’s understanding of American-Middle Eastern relations is more complex than one typically gets from American cinema. And, to its credit, Kandahar takes pains to point out that Middle Eastern powers aren’t a monolith and instead are subject to nationalistic and sectarian conflicts with each other. There’s even an earnest attempt to not only grapple with the West’s impact on the region over the last several decades, but to thwart Tom’s white guilt in showing how willing he is to put Mo in harm’s way despite their obvious rapport. Pity, then, that Waugh and Mitchell LaFortune’s script struggles to piece together these nuances into a cohesive and convincing whole, only catching fleeting glimpses of them in between the prolonged and by and large routine chase-a-thon that pads out the film’s running time.
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