Kandahar review: Gerard Butler, Ali Fazal’s actioner is stunningly shot, but lacks thrill

3/5

STORY: After his secret mission lays bare, a CIA operative must save himself from special forces in Afghanistan. Trying to get on a US flight, he is accompanied by his translator, who is losing hope that he’ll ever be able to make it to his family in Baltimore.  

REVIEW: A story set in Afghanistan, featuring a rugged and smart Gerard Butler in the middle of all the action. The film must be worth watching! Well, it is. But you have probably seen movies like this before and even Gerard in similar roles, so the punch is somewhat lacking. The plot reminds you of Guy Ritchie’s recently released action thriller The Covenant, while Gerard’s character resembles that of himself in Dean Devlin’s 2017 sci-fi disaster film Geostorm and a few others from his previous movies. And then, there are times when you’ll feel it looks like a Bollywood actioner. No, not because of Ali Fazal, who plays an intelligence officer named Kahil Nasir. 

The story primarily follows an undercover CIA operative Tom Harris (played by Gerard), whose mission unfortunately gets exposed in a hostile Afghan territory, and now he must abort everything and run to save his life. He is accompanied by a translator Mohammad ‘Mo’ Doud (Navid Negahban), who has already lost his son in a past battle, and has no interest in fighting the Taliban combatants anymore. The plot is majorly focussed on their struggle to reach a defunct CIA base in Kandahar, from where they are supposed to be flown out on a US flight.

Tom is actually an MI-6 agent, who is on loan to the CIA. He comes under the radar after he sabotages an Iranian nuclear power plant, while working on the premises as a repairman for a telecom company. He would have still been able to leave the country, before his whereabouts got traced. Mind you, his tickets for Gatwick were booked, and he was sure to make it to his daughter’s graduation day. But things take a different turn when his handler Roman Chalmers (Travis Fimmel) gave him a second job that meant him operating out of Herat, which is located just over the border from Iran. 

To add to the fire, Tom’s cover gets exposed when a journalist named Nina Toussaint-White (Luna Cujai) failed to carefully handle the information she received from a Pentagon whistleblower. Following which, it didn’t take long for Iranian intelligence officer Bahador Foladi (Fazard Asadi) to identify Tom and set on a mission to hunt him down. In the middle of all the ruckus, you meet Khalil - who is employed with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency - and is tasked to catch Tom, before the Iranians take him or he is gunned down by the thugs in the desert. If Khalil emerges successful, he’s also been promised to be taken out of Afghanistan forever and posted to either London or Paris.

While the Ric Roman Waugh directorial is stunningly shot and it deserves all the praise for treating the audience to splendid images of Afghanistan's arid and rocky terrains, the narrative is nowhere close to complementing that. The action sequences are a tad bit run-of-the-mill, making you wonder why they look so familiar. That said, the film does manage to show the plight of general citizens in conflict zones. There is a scene featuring a little boy and Ali in the desert, where the former insists on how a ‘non-believer’ should be treated, whereas he himself has never read the Quran. Overall in the supporting cast, Tom Rhys Harries (Oliver Alterman) and Mark Arnold (Mark Lowe), among others, deserve a special mention.

VERDICT: Not a film that cannot be missed. But if you are a Gerard Butler fan, you might want to watch Kandahar once. Ali Fazal is a svelte and smart intelligence officer, zooming through the arid land on a high-end bike. And his role in the movie is, in fact, a deciding one, but his performance lacks depth in a few scenes.