Kandahar movie review: Ali Fazal’s livewire performance isn’t enough to save Gerard Butler’s generic action film

Name: Kandahar
Released: 2023-06-16T15:14:43+05:30
Cast: Gerard Butler, Ali Fazal

Kandahar movie review: The new Gerard Butler vehicle is a mostly-dull slog that benefits greatly from a charismatic performance by Ali Fazal.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Ali Fazal in a still from Kandahar, starring Gerard Butler.

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Kandahar movie review: Ali Fazal’s livewire performance isn’t enough to save Gerard Butler’s generic action film

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When The Russia House became one of the first Hollywood productions to be filmed inside the Soviet Union in 1989, it seemed like the winds of change were blowing across town. Nobody quite remembers it for anything else these days. And years from now, the equally unmemorable action film Kandahar will become a favourite subject at pub quizzes and trivia nights for similar reasons. Released on Prime Video after a brief theatrical run abroad, it’s the first major American production to be shot inside the formerly hermit Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But even if you remember the facts around its production, you’d likely be stumped if anybody were to interrogate you about the details of the film’s plot. Heck, you could probably claim a medal if you’re able to recall the name of Gerard Butler’s character (he’s called Tom Harris, by the way).”

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Tom is a freelance contractor for the CIA, who, in the opening minutes of the movie, successfully hacks into an Iranian nuclear facility, which the Americans raze from the face of the earth some hours later. The Iranians aren’t pleased about this surgical strike, and so, they deploy a scary-looking moustachioed man to round up all the suspects and show them no mercy. The first on the list is a British journalist, who’d obtained documents to prove that the Americans were behind the attack on the nuclear facility. But when those documents are leaked, Tom Harris — that’s Butler’s character, remember? — finds that his cover has been blown. The CIA quickly sets a plan into motion to get him out of there.

What unfolds is essentially a chase thriller, in which Tom must race across the war-torn region towards Kandahar, where he has been assured an extraction team will meet him. He is joined by a local translator named Mo (Navid Neghaban) and is tailed by a vape-smoking, Tinder-swiping, hip-hop-blasting ISI agent named Kahil (played by Ali Fazal). Fazal is the film’s standout performer, injecting a world-weariness to his flamboyant character, who seems like the sort of person who has spent so much time in the field, he has discovered that to survive, he must find ways to entertain himself.

Kandahar strays from the kind of movies that Butler usually stars in these days — loud, muscular, and dead-serious action films in which he invariably saves the day at the end. For one, there’s very little action in Kandahar, which might strike Butler’s die-hard fans as a bit odd. The first act has this strange espionage thriller vibe that feels at once convoluted and yet so uncomplicated. For instance, nobody bothers to explain how Tom is able to evade capture so easily in the film’s opening scenes — especially after he already attracted the suspicion of local cops — but important plot beats about the leak of the secret documents are hammered home in the loudest manner possible.

The chase itself is rather unexciting. And there’s a roughly 15-minute stretch that takes place in the dark, which director Ric Roman Waugh occasionally films in night vision. There’s also an attempt, after the movie has stopped pretending to be Body of Lies, to contrive situations through which Tom and Mo can bond. This section of the movie is eerily similar to Guy Ritchie’s recent war drama The Covenant — an infinitely more enjoyable movie that, at its core, was also an apologia for the War on Terror.

But Kandahar’s remorseful tone about US foreign policy is ironic, considering where, and under whose supervision the movie was made. Unlike Mulan, for which Disney was (rightly) criticised for sanctioning scenes to be shot in China’s Xinjiang province, nobody raised a stink about Kandahar being filmed in Saudi Arabia. The movie itself has the gall to portray Iran and Afghanistan — the two countries in which its story is predominantly set — as barbaric hellscapes where people are hanged on street corners and random citizens are publicly flogged by men in uniforms.

Waugh has proven himself a skilled action filmmaker in the past, and a couple of set-pieces in Kandahar — particularly a mid-movie car chase — are nicely staged. But Kandahar is essentially like something that Kabir Khan would make — by-the-numbers genre fare with delusions of grandeur. By attempting to inject heft to the drama, and by completely robbing the experience of all levity, the movie ends up short-changing itself.