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REVIEW: “This is going to be bigger than Snowden and Wikileaks combined.”
Der Herold reporter Luna Cujai (Nina Toussaint-White) has no plans to undersell the story her Pentagon source has revealed to her, as the new action movie Kandahar (now streaming on Prime Video) quickly sets out its stall.
She’s been informed that the CIA has not only recently assassinated two Iranian nuclear scientists and an Al-Qaeda leader, but they’ve also infiltrated key Iranian government installations, thanks to their black ops team members posing as workers for companies like Swiss telecommunications giant Siblixt.
It’s an explosive exclusive – and Luna’s delighted editor plans to run it on the front page.
For career spy Tom Harris (Gerard Butler) though, it’s an additional headache he doesn’t need at a critical time. Exposing his alias and – more importantly – his visage just after he’s helped destroy an underground nuclear facility has now made him a No. 1 target for any number of regimes and organisations.
Even worse, he should already be on a plane back to the UK, so he can attend his 17-year-old daughter’s high school graduation.
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Gerard Butler plays career spy Tom Harris in Kandahar.
Instead, having agreed to one last three-day mission that would wipe out Iran’s entire nuclear programme – a covert operation that quickly goes south – he now finds himself having to travel 400 miles in just 30 hours if he’s to make the one supposedly secure flight out of the region.
And, as he himself notes to his CIA handler Roman Chalmers (Travis Fimmel), it’s not the distance that’s the problem, it’s “what lies in-between”.
Reuniting increasingly beardy B-grade action star Butler with his Angel Has Fallen and Greenland director Ric Roman Waugh, Kandahar is blighted by predictable action, one-dimensional characters and a political sensibility that’s best described as jingoistic, jaundiced and xenophobic. This is a film that desperately wants to be this year’s Argo or Escape from Mogadishu, but lacks either of those films’ subtlety, nuance, or even any semblance of tension-building.
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Like the recent, superior, Plane, Kandahar is another movie where Gerard Butler plays a man who simply wants to get home to see his estranged daughter.
Written by former Defence Intelligence Agency officer Mitchell LaFortune – and apparently based on his own experiences of being deployed to Afghanistan in 2013 – this supposedly contemporary tale feels at least 15 years out of date.
Closer to Team America: World Police than Homeland in its depiction of the Middle-East and Central Asia and their inhabitants, the script never tires of reminding us of how repressed women’s rights are in Afghanistan and Iran, while one scene sees a room full of CIA staff loudly applaud mass casualties and a potential environmental disaster.
There’s a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence officer (Ali Fazal’s Kahil Nasir) who is set up as a kind of 007-style nemesis for Butler’s on-loan-from-MI6 “chameleon” Harris, but is woefully under-written, while one key character’s potential double-cross is terribly telegraphed and crassly linked to his discovery of a new faith.
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Butler is joined by Travis Fimmel in Kandahar.
Yes, there’s some whizzy drone footage, a few adrenaline-pumping chases and fire fights, but there’s also an overwhelming sense of déjà vu and who cares about yet another Butler movie (released earlier this year, Plane, also on Prime Video, is far superior in every way) where he plays a guy just wanting to get home to his estranged teen daughter.
Kandahar is now streaming on Prime Video.
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