‘Kandahar’ Review: Gerard Butler Reunites With Ric Roman Waugh In Depthless Spy Thriller

Valerie Complex
·3 min read
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Kandahar reunites is director Rick Roman Waugh with Gerard Butler, after they made Angel Has Fallen and Greenland together. This time they tackle the spy thriller genre, with cast that includes Travis Fimmel, Navid Negahban, Ali Fazal, and Bahador Foladi. With the script penned by Mitchell LaFortune, these particular types of stories often suffer from narrative sameness: westerner travels to the Middle East, things go boom, westerner saves the day, the end. This follows a predictable path.

The story begins in Iran with Tom Harris (Butler) with his partner Oliver (Tom Rhys Harries) working on wiring at a nuclear plant center. This cover is just to deposit a bomb. The two are surrounded by guards who become suspicious of their intentions, but Harris de-escalates the situation, and they manage to get away. His partner is worried that the army forces are onto them being CIA spies. Things are fine until their cover is blown by a reporter trying to break a story on what the CIA is doing in the middle east, and now they must go into hiding while the nuclear plant explodes.

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Meanwhile, in Herat, Afghanistan, Mo (Negahban) is set to work as a translator and receives his orders from Roman (Fimmel), a CIA liaison in the UAE, where he meets Harris. Even though the CIA agent is on the run, Roman asks for one more short-term job to destroy another power plant, to which Harris says yes for some reason. This is when he connects with Mo, and the pair have limited time to finish the job before they are discovered and killed before getting home.

You know, there is an interesting subplot going on with Mo searching for his sister, who was a teacher abducted by the Taliban and hasn’t been heard from since. That is a mystery worth getting invested in, not whatever Kandahar is. Stories about the West at war with Brown people peaked with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (Although I also enjoyed Nicolai Fuglsig’s 12 Strong). Maybe there is something about chronicling history based on actual events that hold something over these made-up western savior narratives that have nothing going for them except to be monotonous, xenophobic and a complete bore.

Is Gerard Butler trying to take the crown from Liam Neeson as the scruffy older man willing to battle for truth, justice, and the Western way? Zack Snyder’s 300 is his most notable role to date, but Butler also seems to follow Neelson’s same trajectory as he stars in one action slog after the next with similar plot lines and one-note performances. Then again, I can’t fault him for tapping into a long-standing, established genre.

I promise I don’t have anything against this type of movie. I take issue with so many of them not being worth watching. For Kandahar to be called an action film, there should be action. Look, there isn’t much more to say about it except it will induce so many eye rolls you might see your brain stem in the process because watching through the whole 2-hour runtime is its own hostage situation.

Title: Kandahar
Release date: May 26, 2023
Distributor: Open Road Films
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Screenwriters: Mitchell LaFortune
Cast: Gerard Butler, Travis Fimmel, Navid Negahban, Ali Fazal, and Bahador Foladi
Rating: R
Running time: 120 min

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