1 star
Gerard Butler was born too late. He would have been an excellent 80s action movie star, with box office numbers up there alongside Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Seagal, and Van Damme. He would probably be more successful than Seagal and Van Damme since he’s arguably a better actor whose proven he can do romantic comedy (The Bounty Hunter), Shakespeare (Coriolanus), and even musicals (Phantom of the Opera) on the big screen.
But Butler was only 15 when Arnold first came to earth in The Terminator and just eight when Stallone put on the gloves in Rocky. By the time he had his action-hero breakthrough playing King Leonidas in 300 (he was 37 at the time), the style of movie he was tailor-made for had long passed its prime. Over the next 17 years, he tried many different things as an actor, from animated movie voice-over in How to Train Your Dragon to romcoms and Shakespeare, as mentioned above. Still, his bread and butter has been being the heroic good guy in increasingly generic action movies. The details may change from film to film, but Butler always plays the guy who saves the world by shooting, stabbing, choking, punching, and blowing up the dozens of cartoonish bad guys standing between him and saving Democracy/America/England/The Free World in time to get back to his estranged family before they leave him.
His latest movie, Kandahar, is more of the same. Butler plays Tom Harris, an MI-6 agent on loan to the CIA for an undercover mission where he blows up an Iranian underground nuclear plant. The mission goes smoothly enough, and the world is safe from the CIA’s unsanctioned sabotage because a character assures us that “most of the radiation (from the nuclear explosion) is underground.” The only fallout comes when Harris’s cover is blown, and his plans for a quick getaway in time to get back for his daughter’s graduation hit a major SANFU.
Butler spends the next hour or so on the screen running around shooting, stabbing, choking, punching, and blowing up the dozens of cartoonish bad guys. It’s all very chaotic and very dull. In a cinematic age where action fans watched Keanu Reeves kill a guy with a pencil in the exciting and stylish John Wick, it’s hard to get excited about Kandahar‘s relatively pedestrian car chases and shootouts.
And while there has always been a high degree of Western jingoism in most action movies, the political problems in Kandahar loom large. Someone with a better understanding of the Middle East will be better equipped to comment on the portrayal of those countries and their people in the movie, but watching the CIA remotely blow up a nuclear plant from the safety of a state-side office, with absolutely no mention of innocent lives lost in the blast or, no matter what that character said, from fallout after the explosion, is tough to sit through. The way the people in the office applaud when their covert plan is a success is sickening.
