Rating: R | Runtime: 119 minutes
Release Date: May 26th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Open Road Films / Briarcliff Entertainment
Director(s): Ric Roman Waugh
Writer(s): Mitchell LaFortune

You must go home to remember what you are fighting for.

There’s an interesting film inside of director Ric Roman Waugh and star Gerard Butler’s latest team-up Kandahar and it’s called Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. What Ritchie understood and screenwriter Mitchell LaFortune doesn’t is that the real issues facing Afghanistan today are way too complex to delve into with a two-hour movie.

So, you focus on one aspect. You follow an American soldier and his translator as they risk their lives for each other and realize the reason they must is because their countries have ceased caring for them beyond being pawns in a never-ending war without winners. LaFortune tries to make that reality standout too, but overtly rather than a background. And he cannot help shooting himself in the foot every time he introduces another puzzle piece with faux humanity despite using them all as weapons of destruction.

Does he truly want us to feel something for the Iranian (Bahador Foladi’s Farzad) and Pakistani (Ali Fazal’s Kahil) hot on Tom Harris (Butler) and Mohammad’s (Navid Negahban) tail while they try to flee to Kandahar and catch a British plane home? The former is “just doing his job” and doesn’t want to hurt his hostages because he too has a child while the latter is getting sick of his desert posting because he really wants to embrace the West’s materialism and capitalism.

They want to capture Tom to advance and/or survive. They have families to get home to too, each risking their life again and again under the umbrella of making the world better for them. They’re no different than Tom or Mohammad. They’re just on the opposite side. As is the Taliban, ISIS, and every other regime arriving to fill the void left by America’s retreat. Yes, they are human. We can’t care about them, though, if the script doesn’t first.

Our only focus is therefore the “heroes” we know: GI Joe and the “good” Brown man. It’s that simplicity that sells these war films. So, if you want to add in some gray, you have to try. You can’t just toss it in as flavor and think the audience is going to take the bait. We won’t. We’re just going to laugh at the melodrama of choosing to show the loved ones and bosses of the bad guys who inevitably die mourn them.

We’re going to hope something of substance might finally be said beyond a hollow “I don’t care. They can fire me.” when someone does the correct wrong thing (even as that thing being the deaths of hundreds of people while those back at Langley clap their hands at the videogame on-screen is glossed over). When the filmmakers do attempt to add depth via Mohammad’s dead son and missing sister-in-law, they give it no weight. None of it is dealt with beyond the empty narrative calories of overwrought distraction.

Rip all that superfluity away and you could have coasted by with a mindless exfiltration film. Tom commits a huge act of black-ops aggression, gets burned, and has every entity in the Middle East looking to capture him to either publicly kill him or sell him to those who will. He and Mohammad must therefore race against time (that plane in Kandahar is their only shot out) and the bullets of enemies (and enemies of enemies) since the US can’t actually do anything but watch and “advise”.

Throw in eccentric (Travis Fimmel) and controversial (Ray Haratian) “friends” and things do get tense enough to hold our attention without throwing in the kitchen sink of meaningless heartstring tugs for the characters we’re told to hate. You can’t “both sides” a one-dimensional escape film. Giving your Brown men wives and desires for modernity doesn’t magically erase that you’re still equating their existence with evil. The least you could do is own it.

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Gerard Butler stars as Tom Harris and Navid Negahban as Mohammad “Mo” Doud in director Ric Roman Waugh’s KANDAHAR, an Open Road Films / Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Hopper Stone, SMPSP | Open Road Films / Briarcliff Entertainment.