Lead actor and producer Gerald Butler reteams with his Angel Has Fallen and Greenland director Ric Roman Waugh for Kandahar, an action film set in one of Hollywood's favourite conflict zones, Afghanistan.
The thriller, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, revolves around a CIA black ops agent on the run across the Afghan desert after his cover is blown. An Iranian colonel and a Pakistani agent are in hot pursuit of the man after he has, in a daring operation, injected malware into the operating system of an Iranian nuclear reactor and sent it up in flames.
Working with a plot that uses simplistic means with an eye on easy mass consumption, Kandahar, for the most part, plays like a standard war drama/spy thriller predicated on an oft-repeated, convenient binary. On one hand there are the Taliban, the ISIS factions and the enemy agents. On the other, local elements on the ground risk their lives to collaborate with the CIA operative. But that isn't all there is to the film.
The screenplay by former military intelligence man Mitchell LaFortune not only carves out significant roles for the film's two principal antagonists but also refrains from portraying them as unthinking, bloodthirsty monsters. They are human too. One of them receives a call from his wife while he is out in the field. Stay safe, she says.
In another sequence, the Pakistani agent runs into an Afghan boy who makes IEDs convinced that he is seving the cause of his religion The ISI man tells him that his understanding of Islam is flawed. These stray moments in Kandahar may not quite take the spotlight away from the hero's larger-than-life exploits but they do give the plot a significant additional strand.
That is not to say that Kandahar is an epitome of balance and precision, but the writing is judicious enough to allow the three key supporting actors - Iranian-American Navid Negahban, Iranian-Swedish Farzad Foladi and the Mumbai movie industry's very own Ali Fazal - the scope to make an impression in what is otherwise a Gerald Butler show all the way.
In his second actioner of the year after the middling Plane, Butler dons the garb of Tom Harris, a secret agent who accomplishes a crucial mission in Iran by blowing up a nuclear reactor. "God, I like this guy," says a CIA official monitoring the hero's progress from the agency's headquarters in the US. "He is good."
Whether you agree or not with that assessment would depend on what you expect from an espionage drama. Both Butler and the character that he plays have their moments in the film. In the thick of the action all through the two-hour runtime, they fit the bill to perfection.
Ali Fazal is just as much on the ball. Playing a steely ISI agent, Kazir Nazir, he hits the ground running. Riding a black bike as he chases Tom and his translator Mohammad "Mo" Doud (Navid Negahban, who also delivers a solid turn) across the desert, the actor is at full throttle all through the film.
On his way back home after the successful Iran mission, Tom is delayed in Dubai. He squeezes in a meeting with his handler Roman Chalmers (Travis Fimmel), who convinces the agent to accept another job - this time around in Herat, Afghanistan. The money is good. Tom needs it for his daughter Ida's (Olivia-Mai Barrett) education.
Mo makes his way to Herat before Tom gets there. As it transpires, the translator isn't a mere accomplice. He is on a mission of his own that sees him take on a havoc-wreaking, CIA-backed warlord in a crucial scene late in the film. It is people like you who empower warlords like these, he accuses Tom angrily. The CIA agent has no riposte.
A Pentagon leak scuttles Tom's mission in Afghanistan. While a British journalist Luna Cujai (Nina Toussaint-White) is nabbed by Iranian authorities for receiving classified info on CIA ops in the Middle East, Tom is forced to flee.
"No one is coming to rescue us," the CIA agent tells Mo and hits the road to make a perilous 400-mile journey from Herat to Kandahar. It isn't the distance that is important, Tom is told, but what might lie in store for him on the way.
Farzad Asadi (Bahador Foladi), a colonel in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who arrests the British scribe for allegedly spying for the West, is charged with delivering Tom to the Supreme Leader. Agent Nazir, on the other hand, wants to capture Tom because Pakistan intends to auction him to the highest bidder. With sundry other dangers strewn in their path, Tom and Mo have to dodge bullets and mortars fired at them from all directions.
Does all the pyrotechnics add up to an edge-of-the-edge thriller? Parts of Kandahar are indeed mounted with flair. Most of the film, however, pans out on lines that are easy to anticipate. Without being spectacularly gripping, the film manages to gallop along at a steady pace as it stages a bitter battle for survival in a terrain where there is no place to hide. Passable fare that does not go off the boil too often thanks as much to Gerald Butler as to Ali Fazal.
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Gerard Butler, Ali Fazal, Tom Rhys Harries, Farhad Bagheri, Navid Negahban