Kandahar

Leno

May 17, 2023

8/10

A CIA agent in Afghanistan has to try escape the hostile territory when his disguise is blown. If you apply some suspension of disbelief to accept that it would be possible to a single man to survive being followed by an army of enemies, Kandahar is actually a quite well-made movie! Very contemporary, following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the movie does a good job showing the hostile atmosphere where different factions (Taliban, I.S.I.S, and the Iranian government) fight each other but h…

Yet another military pot boiler, starring, once again, Gerard Butler. Kandahar pretends to be open and inclusive. There's a modest plug for nationalism/patriotism, from the perspective of different nations.That said, this film is essentially about saving a man who commits a pretty awful act of terrorism, in another nation, at the behest of the CIA. Its quite watchable, there's a lot of serviceable action. That' said, its hard to overlook the predictable marketing of US/UK exceptionalism as…

The Best

Gerard Butler is an actor who knows his strengths and takes roles that play to them, and his charismatic lead performance is one of the best things about “Kandahar,” a military action thriller about undercover CIA operative Tom (Gerard Butler) who is stuck deep in hostile territory in Afghanistan with his translator, Mo (Navid Negahban). It’s vaguely familiar to this year’s “The Covenant” from Guy Ritchie, yet the two films are very different. Here, the two men must work together to avoid the el…

CinemaSerf

August 14, 2023

5/10

When a CIA mission goes awry, agent "Harris" (Gerard Butler) finds himself stuck in Afghanistan with his interpreter "Parshand" (Farhad Bagheri) and with his identity now on the open market! As you might expect, the next two hours is spent on the usual, derivative, cat and mouse antics as they try to stay one step ahead of pursuing warlords, mercenaries and - well, luckily, I don't actually have a gun! It's so formulaic and unnecessary this film and by half an hour in there isn't the slightest h…

Another okay Butler action movie, but a little low on the action part. They tried to make the main villain guy way too "cool" and he just ended up seeming like a bad anime character. Bunch of white savior stuff going on here and some comments could be made about how the translator wouldn't need saving by the US if not for the US in the first place. Ummm, ya, whatever, looking forward to more Butler! You can put this ham on your face if you want, but it's a bit slimy.

From the director of "Greenland", Ric Roman Waugh has an established style of working, this time again with Gerard Butler. This action-thriller from the starter writer Mitchell LaFortune doesn't fall far from other films of this genre that became a trend lately (the relation of black-ops agents or soldiers and the translators that follows them, many times not credited from the danger they expose themselves from). But is is a solid movie with far distance and expansive shots of landscape, anot…