Confusion reigns in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s latest film, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” and it’s an appropriate emotion for the movie’s fractured setting: the Afghanistan War, circa 2003-2006. This is where an American news operation dispatches Kim Barker (Tina Fey), a bored desk reporter with no war-zone experience but whose status as a member of the “childless and unmarried” newsroom personnel makes her an ideal candidate for a three-month embedment in Kabul.
The first half-hour of “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”—we might as well abbreviate it “WTF,” for good reason—is an intermittently amusing fish-out-of-water comedy pivoting on its protagonist’s learning curves and cultural naivety, from fashion faux pas to misused terminology to forced desert bathroom breaks (it’s based on the memoir by the real Kim Barker). Even when “WTF” is at its strongest, though, you wish it were more sophisticated in its humor, which fails to rise above the jarring baseline of colorful Farsi profanity delivered by unlikely sources.
But the understandable confusion of day-to-day life in the “Kabubble,” as her fellow-journos dub it, gives way to a curious confusion in the movie itself. Is it a hard-R rom-com disguised in war fatigues? Is it a drama about finding yourself amid the multicultural strangeness of Kabul nightlife? Is it a thriller predicated on the addictive rush of war-zone immersion? Or is it a comment on our collective ignorance of a war the media has long consigned to oblivion?
Only the last of these directions justifies this rickety movie’s existence, and it’s one brick in an unsteady foundation. As Kim familiarizes herself with the region’s customs and personalities, she begins to prefer the stunted limbo of war correspondence, where nothing much happens, and even if it does, the American public is disinterested in hearing it. Similar shards of harsh truth pierce through the feces-stained air of the movie’s Afghan waystation, like the moment when a group of locals mistake American Marines for Russians (the previous nationality of soldiers to attrition themselves in this desert quagmire), or when a troop, following an explosion of a truckful of suspected Taliban, callously quips, “hearts and minds—the two best places to shoot somebody.”
Mostly, though, “WTF” meanders. Extraordinary actors disappear skillfully into an ensemble that includes Alfred Molina as a lascivious Afghan attorney general, Martin Freeman as a smug Scottish photojournalist and Billy Bob Thornton as a folksy colonel, but their characters are less flesh-and-blood people than archetypes fitting like colors in the rainbow of Kim’s self-actualization.
The movie runs 111 minutes but feels twice as long because of its tonal incoherence. It lumbers, sparklessly and shapelessly, toward an increasingly didactic denouement that substitutes lacerating reality with pat comfort. We’ve heard enough times that war is hell, but it’s still a more honest conclusion than this movie’s shaky summation: War is Enlightenment.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” opens in South Florida theaters and across the nation Friday, March 4.
