Meet Tom Harris. British freelance undercover guy, working for the CIA, with strained family ties, doing one more job to get back in time for his daughter’s graduation. This tough guy role is muscle memory for Gerard Butler at this point. Olympus has fallen, London has fallen, Angel has fallen, Plane, and now this.
So Harris has destroyed an Iranian nuclear site and needs to get out of Iran, but stays on for one more job. He meets up with his translator, the undeniably talented Naved Negahban (Homeland) as Mo and of course things go south and he has to get out of there, via Kandahar, Afghanistan. The race and the chase to get there is essentially the whole movie as you might’ve guessed by now.
But the highlight for us should be Ali Fazal as Kahil, a Pakistani operative on Harris’ tail trying to capture him before the others do just so his government can use him as leverage. Cool and collected Fazal is such a nice addition to the cast as the weary operative who wants out. His dialogue delivery, his stunts (turns out he did a few of the stunts himself), the ease with which he carried himself through the movie makes for interesting watching.
Butler, as always delivers on the action and the car chases along some gorgeous Saudi Arabian landscapes filling in for Afghanistan, look absolutely beautiful in their desolation.
There are pockets of disappointing plot development that make you want the dialogues to be more than just lip service about the state of the world. It’s a decent watch for a lazy weekend afternoon when you want to watch something other than reruns of TV shows.
Kandahar is a nice, fast paced, riotous, action packed film that you really shouldn’t waste too much time trying to analyze. Some characters show up without much background on them and hastily slapped together dialogues try to iron on these little creases in the plot, but fail. Not miserably. Just disappointingly.
