‘Kandahar’ Review – Gerard Butler Action Flick Is Explosive To A Fault

The Gerard Butler action flick has become a bit of an anomaly. Despite vastly different settings and scenarios, they’re all basically the same. They take heavy themes and stick them, and you, on the front lines, bullets whizzing past from all sides. You may not know why everyone is shooting, but it becomes so loud and overwhelming after a while that it wouldn’t matter if you did. By the end of it, you’re left alone on an empty battlefield with ringing ears and one singular thought: “What just happened?” Kandahar is no different.

Despite playing what is essentially just a war-guy stereotype, Gerard Butler isn’t bad here. Really, he never is. He commits to these sorts of movies and their basic character formulations. Without him, films like these (take Olympus/London/Angel Has Fallen as other examples) would not exist, at least not on the level of popularity that they do. He’s very talented, if not narrow, and does have the potential to carry a film. But the weight of this one specifically is far too heavy. In the face of his efforts, the dialogue is unsalvageable. It’s cheap, constantly holds your hand, and hardly ever feels realistic.

We’re constantly spoon-fed new bits of exposition that the screenplay is too bloated to squeeze in properly, and it becomes very easy to miss some of it, because you’re likely to zone out after a while. This entire movie is made up of the same scenario happening repeatedly, with similar one-liners and beats happening in intervals to move it along. The first, second, and third act all feel essentially the same in regards to progression, with the second act perhaps being more tense than the third. The resulting experience is an uneven drag.

Further debilitating Butler, and the rest of the admittedly superb cast (specific shout-out to Navid Negahban for his heart-wrenching performance), is the utter lack of character writing or development. Instead of fleshed-out motivations, these characters simply have one-dimensional goals. All of them have somewhere to be or something to achieve, though the reason is rarely clear as to why. This film is not lacking on people we have to follow around, either. There are three or four different parties that we’re constantly jumping between throughout the whole thing.

But even then, none of them hold any level of interest because none of them grow. They’re all just steaming towards their ends, of which we have zero connection, and by the end of it all, some get there and some don’t. Regardless of their fates, they’re bound to be forgotten by the time the next scene rolls around.

It is a shame, because the subject matter here is worth talking about, and there are a few moments of punctuality that define what this could’ve been. A specific conversation towards the third act comes to mind, in which Mo (played by the aforementioned Negahban) comes face to face with a former enemy of sorts, no spoilers. But essentially, he has a chance for revenge, and denies it in the name of his belief in his God’s ultimate moral principle. He rejects the cycle of militant violence and distrust that permeates this film’s narrative, which sets him apart.

Not only does this moment solidify him as the most compelling character in the film by far, but it makes for a genuinely thought-provoking conflict rife with tension and stakes. If Mo had been the main character, with that conflict at the forefront, this film could’ve had a very different outlook. Unfortunately, moments after that scene we’re whisked away to a battlefield to once again endure another overlong sequence of aimless warfare.

Aimless really is the best word for Kandahar. The flashy visuals, familiar faces, and guns-n-glory nature of it all end up amounting to very little, because those things are far less impressive when they’re all a film has to offer. Not to mention that this film shares extreme story similarities with Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, which not only came out just last month, but is much better than this film in every regard. Unless you’re just a huge Gerard Butler fan, Kandahar probably doesn’t warrant the price of admission. It doesn’t offer anything new on the storytelling front, and even if it looks impressive and occasionally tries to say something substantive, those flashes of promise are far too infrequent to make any of the rest of this worth it.

Kandahar will debut in theaters on May 26, 2023 courtesy of Open Road. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHs6z9RPGtA]