New Movie Alert! Kandahar

Kandahar

2023

Action / Thriller

Plot summary

After his mission is exposed, an undercover CIA operative stuck deep in hostile territory in Afghanistan must fight his way out, alongside his Afghan translator, to an extraction point in Kandahar, all whilst avoiding elite enemy forces and foreign spies tasked with hunting them down.

Movie Reviews

6 / 10

Even Gerard Butler couldn’t save this convoluted mess.

I couldn’t decide if this film had more plot holes or subplots. I mean even the subplots had subplots. The entire story was underwhelming, clunky, slow-paced with too many thinly developed and lackluster subplots. There was too much superficial glossy filler that didn’t help the already confusing and muddled story. The editing was sloppy, and the action scenes far and few in between were also unremarkable. Adding sappy soundtracks made the few thrills cringeworthy.

This film may have worked had the two-hour runtime been extended an extra hour to fill in the thin and underdeveloped subplots, or, and preferably, shave off around thirty minutes by omitting the mostly irrelevant subplots. For example, the Pakistani agent was absolutely unnecessary, and putting him on a motorbike like it was a superhero’s sidekick was laughable. The directing was no better; the motorbike is near the truck, yet the truck loses him around a corner, truck gets a flat, they change it, disarm a kid, explode landmines, and the biker is nowhere to be found, yet almost catches up to them in the middle of nowhere, then runs out of gas. One cell call (in the middle of a desert) and a truck comes to pick him up out of nowhere almost immediately lol. It’s like a high school drama class wrote and directed this nonsense.

It’s a generous 6/10 from me, mostly for the decent casting and performances, and some great landscapes and production sets. If you want to see a similar film that is near perfect, watch Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. That’s how it’s supposed to be done.