Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (July 26, 2023)
When we last saw Gerard Butler, he played the lead in a big goofy action movie called Plane. Butler’s next offering focused on a more reality-based tale, as 2023’s Kandahar comes based on true events.
Tom Harris (Butler) works as a CIA operative. During a mission to Afghanistan, he finds his identity exposed.
Inevitably, this leads to danger, and he struggles to reach the extraction point. Along with handler/translator Mohammad "Mo" Doud (Navid Negahban), Tom fights the odds to escape to safety.
If that plot sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Released about one month before Kandahar, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant covered similar territory.
That said, the two don’t provide identical tales. Covenant actually comes with two connected but different rescues, whereas Kandahar focuses solely on one.
Too bad Kandahar can’t muster the same emotion and dramatic impact as the slightly earlier Guy Ritchie flick. While the Butler project attempts to milk these dramatic trends, it largely fails.
Director Ric Roman Waugh started out in stunts and graduated to the director’s chair with 2001’s In the Shadows. This marks his third collaboration with Butler, and they have more in the works.
Their two prior flicks – 2019’s Angel Has Fallen and 2020’s Greenland - didn’t exactly dazzle me. In addition, when Waugh stepped away from his usual action genre with 2021’s National Champions, he did nothing to inspire my hopes that he’d become a good director.
Back home with his usual bang-bang fare, Kandahar also fails to alter my pre-existing opinion of Waugh. While it brings a watchable affair, it never turns into anything better than that.
Granted, the déjà vu of Kandahar so hot on the heels of the similar Covenant doesn’t help. Nonetheless, Waugh’s movie fails to find anything fresh to do with the material.
Butler plays the Standard Butler Role. He always seems to portray worn-down guys estranged from wives/family who live on the margins in some way – but they’re also always amazing at their chosen professions.
Tom ends up as another of these parts, and Butler sleepwalks through his performance. At least he seems to have given up any his terrible attempts at American accents, even though his natural Scottish tones don’t make a lot of sense here.
Kandahar delivers a fairly meatheaded plot, one that asks us to bond with characters who act illegally. The film acknowledges that Tom’s mission forces him to break laws, but of course it wants us to see this as fine and dandy since it involves traditional US enemies.
Oh, Kandahar vaguely hints at the implications, but it fails to follow up these concepts. Don’t expect anything that goes into gray areas during this simplistic story.
If Kandahar delivered the action goods, I might not mind its lame-brained narrative. Unfortunately, the violent scenes feel perfunctory and never do anything to make them fresh.
At no point does Kandahar turn into a bad movie, but it just can’t find a way to give us anything particularly good, either. Too slow and too trite, the film lacks much impact.
