Mission Kandahar: Progressive Script Can’t Disguise Its Hell-Is-Other Countries Premise

By Thom Ernst

Rating: C+

There is nothing grievously wrong with movies like Mission Kandahar other than the American-trapped-on-foreign-soil schtick is getting a bit clunky. Clunkier still when the film attempts to sidestep pesky accusations of xenophobia while addressing issues of brutality beneath a theocratic rule, particularly to women educators.

Mission Kandahar has plenty of accusations to sidestep, and it knows it. But the film’s attempt to stage a more progressive, balanced worldview than previous movies of this ilk has the inauthentic ring of a “But I have friends who are…” claim.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of screenwriter Mitchell LaFortune who loosely bases the script on his own experiences as a former Intelligence Officer, nor do I question his conflicted attitude over the harm the West imposes on their Eastern allies. But the manner these atrocities are conveyed—in one scene as a late-night admission around a campfire—seems obligatory and more like bouts of self-loathing than self-awareness.

Yes, we are plowing through Arab markets, wreaking havoc and blowing things up, but don’t think we’re at all pleased about it!

Mission Kandahar—playing in the States under the title Kandahar—is the third film directed by Ric Roman Waugh and the third of his films to star Gerard Butler—Angel Has Fallen (2019), and Greenland (2020) being the other two.

Here, Butler plays C.I.A. operative, Tom Harris. When Harris’ identity is exposed while on an Afghanistan rescue mission, he and his Afghan translator (Navid Negahban) must escape through a gauntlet of militant Taliban and ISIS supporters, each confrontation deadlier than the last.

It's at this point, when the two men flee to Kandahar, that the film takes on the veneer of a road movie minus the obligatory sing-along to a classic song on the radio scene. Fortunately, between battles, the men have time to bond standing on cliffs overlooking the desert, watching the sun set and spying on incoming caravans of enemy troops. All the while, vaguely Arabic sounding music plays, performed mostly by American musicians, sets the mood.

The film’s most interesting character is Kahil, a one-man assassin, played with slick coolness by Ali Fazal. Kahil is potentially dangerous and spends most of his time barreling through the desert on a motorcycle in search of his prey. He’s an Arabic Jason Bourne for those requiring a more Western comparison.

Like other characters in the film, Kahil espouses a deep faith in his personal beliefs although Kahil seems driven more by ambition than doctrine. Fazal performs Kahil with a satisfying edge that the others, including Butler, lack.

Mission Kandahar gifts viewers with helicopter fights, fast cars, slow cars, and motorcycles bursting out of the back of flatbed trucks. There is even a western-style shootout. But Waugh keeps the action sequences down to Tom Cruise-lite, more like the Cruise we see at the top of Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Kandahar is comparable to films like No Escape (2015), Three Kings (1999), and Lone Survivor (2013), but those old enough—and with exploratory movie tastes—might be reminded of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), a story of a gang fighting through a gauntlet of opposing street gangs (and the cops) to get safely to their turf.

The gang streetwear is flashier and the gangs more menacing in Hill’s movie than in Waugh’s but the premise of getting from A to Z without getting killed remains the same. But where Hill tips the narrative toward the surreal (the painted-faced baseball gang in The Warriors still puts me on edge), Waugh plays Kandahar straight but then keeps distracting from the story with annoying reminders that the movie's heart is in the right place.

“Avoid civilian casualties at all costs,” orders rival leader, Farzad Asadi (Bahador Foladi) thereby effectively announcing that there be civilian casualties ahead while establishing Farzad's innate humanity.

But accepting Mission Kandahar as a film exposing the restricted rights of women under the Taliban is like accepting John Wicks movies as exposing the plight against the SPCA.

Mission Kandahar is standard entertainment that pushes for more than what they can deliver. Slight entertainment is the best it can be.

Mission Kandahar. Directed by Ric Roman Waugh. Starring Gerard Butler, Navid Negahban, Ali Fazal, and Bahador Foladi. In select theatres May 26.