Gerard Butler’s Trip to Kandahar Is a Bust
Before Kandahar, Gerard Butler and Ric Roman Waugh began their working relationship with Angel Has Fallen, the third in Butler’s series of absurd, dimwitted geopolitical terrorism thrillers. It is easily the best of the three, while also serving as an airplane-cinema knockoff of The Fugitive. Having semi-famously starred in Dirtbag Heat in the form of Den of Thieves, having recently starred in a movie simply titled Plane, for God’s sake, it would seem easy enough for Butler to hire Waugh for all manner of ground-beef-and-potatoes-hold-the-potatoes movies. Yet the pair seems to have loftier aims, and the uncommonly ground-level disaster thriller Greenland suggested that they weren’t entirely misplaced. It was basically Geostorm without the Geostorm, which sounds foolhardy, but managed to bring pathos back to the sight of a marriage-challenged man’s-man confronted with the apocalypse.
Kandahar, Butler and Waugh’s third film together, tries to pull off a similar trick. Technically speaking, it works: Once again, they’ve made a film that is more serious and grounded than your potential mental picture of a dissolute, unbathed Butler rampaging through the ruins of a fallen genre. They’ve also made a crushing bore, albeit one that takes a little time to reveal itself as such.
The movie begins with suspense, rather than action: Tom Harris (Butler) is tinkering with some underground wires in Iran, and disarms suspicious local soldiers not by literally knocking the weapons out of their hands, but showing them football on his phone, as proof that he really is fixing up their internet connection. Really, though, he’s a CIA spook-for-hire, sabotaging a nuclear power plant before heading home. As if attempting to reassure the Butler faithful, this short sequence of tension is followed quickly by establishment of the weary-tough-guy trifecta for ol’ Tom: A practically-ex-wife whose divorce papers he won’t sign! A daughter, poised for disappointment if he misses her upcoming big life event! And an unwillingness to step back from a frequently life-threatening job that, when not backed up with any kind of convincing psychology, seems like illogical stubbornness for the sake of the plot!
By the time Kandahar gets to One Last Job, there’s relief, which turns out to be unfounded: Finally, a cliché that’s at least potentially fun. A handler reaches out to Tom to sell him on fitting in one more mission before his flight home. Informed that it will pay enough to send his daughter to med school, Tom agrees and embarks – only for his cover to be blown when journalist Luna (Nina Toussaint-White) exposes the CIA’s plans. The mission must be ditched as Tom and his translator Mo (Navid Negahban) evade enemy soldiers in Afghanistan and make their way to an extraction site in Kandahar. (Yes, there are multiple elements this movie share with a recent one by Guy Ritchie, which looks a bit better by comparison.)