Kandahar film review: Afghanistan’s hard truths on the big screen in new action film

This month marks two years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. It’s no surprise this mess of a war and its aftermath has attracted the attention of filmmakers.

Kandahar starring Gerard Butler. Picture: Prime Video

Kandahar (MA15+)

Prime Video

★★½

This month, August, marks two years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. It’s no surprise this mess of a war and its aftermath has attracted the attention of filmmakers. The range spans the satirically serious – War Machine (2017), directed by Australia’s David Michod and starring Brad Pitt – to the seriously serious, such as Guy Ritchie’s recent The Covenant.

Kandahar, directed by Ric Roman Waugh and starring Scottish action hero Gerard Butler, is set sometime after the US withdrawal. An Afghan interpreter and the man he’s working for drive through an urban street and pass a crane with corpses hanging from it.

“Welcome to the new Afghanistan,’’ the interpreter says. “Same as the old one,’’ replies the westerner. “Yep,” the ­interpreter agrees.

These men of few words are the main characters. Tom Harris (Butler) is a freelance black ops agent working for the CIA. Welearn he started out at MI6, which explains his accent. Mohammad Doud (Iranian-American actor Navid Negahban) is an interpreter who made it out and settled in the US. He has returned for this job and for reasons of his own.

The story opens before they meet. Harris, posing as a Swiss telecoms technician, melts down an Iranian nuclear reactor. Mission accomplished, he drops in on his Dubai-based handler (Australia’s Travis Fimmel, who is always interesting to watch). He’s offered another job, this time in Afghanistan, that he, with a divorce looming and a daughter wanting to go to med school,finds too lucrative to refuse.

When a British journalist (Nina Toussaint-White) reveals it was the CIA that nuked the Iranian nukes – “It’ll be bigger than Snowden,’’ she tells her editor – Harris and his interpreter are exposed. The reporter does not name names in her report.Then the Iranian military questions her. It is the most terrifying scene in the movie, at least for this viewer.

This introduction sets up the main plot. The CIA bosses come up with a plan. The Afghan mission is aborted. Harris and Mohammadare told to flee to the air base at Kandahar where British special forces, and a plane, await.

The have 30 hours to make the 650km trip. “The distance is not the main issue,’’ the Dubai-based handler observes. “It’s what’sin-between.”

This includes the Iranian military, ordered to capture Harris and deliver him to the Supreme Leader for a public execution,a Pakistani secret service agent, ordered to do the same so they can sell him to the highest bidder, Afghan commandos, Taliban warlords, ISIS fighters, pre-teen boys setting up improvised explosive devices, and so on. The resulting actions scenes, such as when Harris takes on a helicopter gunship, are not bad.

As with The Covenant, which I reviewed in June, the focus on the Afghan interpreter is thought-provoking. “We rely on you for everything,’’ Harris tells him. “We tell you how to run your country … and we don’t even say thank you.”

And while this is an action man sort of movie, there is also proper attention paid to what the return of the Taliban means for women and girls in Afghanistan. This two-hour movie is partly drawn from real life. It is written by Mitchell LaFortune,a former US Defence Intelligence Agency operative who had extensive experience in Afghanistan.

In interviews, he has said Harris is “a combination of a bunch of people” he met in that job but Mo is based on one of the interpreters he worked with.

The director and star are frequent collaborators, including on Angel Has Fallen (2019), the third instalment in a series in which Butler is an American secret service agent.

Their new film is a competent war action thriller that shows us the fate of the people who were not able to leave when the allied forces did.

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Haunted Mansion (PG)

In cinemas from August 31

★

This is the second week in a row that I have decided on a one-star review. Last week it was the canine caper Strays. This week it is the supernatural spoof Haunted Mansion. Two Hollywood comedies with barely a laugh between them.

I don’t like dishing out negative reviews. I appreciate that every movie, book, painting, pop song and so on is someone’s work. I start from a position of respect for the artist.

But you have to call it as you see it. Disney’s Haunted Mansion, named after the company’s theme park attraction, is unfunny, unscary, unintelligent and an extravagant waste of acting talent.

You know how some people are so good at something that they can hold a bit back and still be the best? Usain Bolt, for example, could run at one-quarter speed and still thrash me over 100m.

As much as I admire Jamie Lee Curtis, her head alone is not enough to win another Oscar. That’s her lot in this movie. She’s a medium trapped in a crystal ball and all we see is her noggin. I briefly wondered if it was a in-house riff on the rumour of Walt Disney being frozen for future resurrection, but nothing else in the movie suggests that sort of droll humour. And Curtis — who this year won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once — is not alone. The great Danny DeVito is a paranormal historian who wears a transparent raincoat for reasons that add zero to the story.

Owen Wilson is a priest who may be a man of the con rather that the cloth. He does manage to exorcise a few jokes out of a demonically unfortunate predicament.

Oscar nominee Winona Ryder is uncredited for her cameo, perhaps wisely. Oscar winner Jared Leto voices the supernatural villain, whose surname rhymes with Trump.

Jamie Lee Curtis in Haunted Mansion

When this bad ghost’s backstory is revealed, it’s by DeVito’s character reading it out as if from a newspaper report. The script is a ghost town in terms of plot lines, dialogue and especially jokes.

Amid all of this the lead actor, LaKeith Stanfield, Oscar-nominated for Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), is there in body but not in spirit.

The set-up is a New York doctor (Rosario Dawson) and her nine-year-old son (Chase Dillon) move to New Orleans to open a bed and breakfast in a clearly haunted house.

They are trapped there by hundreds of ghosts, as are the people who cross their path: an astrophysicist (Stanfield), the priest/conman, the paranormal boffin, a fully formed medium (Tiffany Haddish) and the head-in-glass-jar medium.

The ghosts are controlled by the villain who needs just one more soul before he can go and make a proper film.

This two-hour movie is directed by Justin Simien, who showed satirical flair in Dear White People (2014), and written by Katie Dippold, who wrote the all-female Ghostbusters (2016).

It is a reboot of The Haunted Mansion (2003), starring Eddie Murphy. I am not averse to movies based on Disney attractions. I like Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in The Jungle Cruise (2021). But in this case it should have been one-ride only.