Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (15)
three stars
Dirs: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
With: Tina Fey, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina
Runtime: 112 minutes
SCOTS get everywhere in the world, and so, too, do their football scarves. That is why you will find Tina Fey, the star of 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, wearing a woolly Celtic scarf in the middle of the Kabul heat in this comedy about a female war reporter. It is a left-field wardrobe choice (she could have gone for Partick Thistle …) for a likably left field film that relies heavily on Fey to see it through the good times, and the not so good.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is based on the book, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Kim Barker. The memoir tells the story of a 40-something journalist who decided her life and career were stuck in the kind of rut that only a posting to a war zone can fix.
As we see Barker, here renamed Baker, sighing on the exercise bike at the gym or toiling at her computer in the States, you can see why Fey wanted to buy the book and make the movie. Rapidly becoming the poster woman for savvy, frustrated, fortysomething women everywhere, Fey is a perfect fit for the desk jockey who rode into war armed with little but a new rucksack and a titanium-strength sense of humour. Not only does Fey take the lead role, she is one of the film’s producers and the screenwriter is her 30 Rock, SNL, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt mucker, Robert Carlock. In short, if you like Fey and her brand of sharp humour and cultivated ditziness, you’ll warm to WTF (the initials, according to those in the loop, stand for a well known phrase, but what the fandango do I know).
Alas, not all the choices in the movie work. The story is tearing along nicely - Baker lands in Afghanistan, makes some amusing Private Benjamin-style rookie errors, etc - then proceedings come to a screeching halt with the arrival of Martin Freeman playing a character called Iain MacKelpie. Iain is introduced as a freelance photographer from Glasgow with a Celtic scarf and accent to prove it. Why any non-Scottish actor takes a chance with the accent I will never know. Freeman has a go and falls flat on his rolling-Rs.
If you can get over that irritation, the rest of the picture plays out amiably enough, with enjoyably snarky humour punctuating the silliness. There is little here that has not been covered before in tales of war reporters - the laughs amid the terror, the friendships forged, the risks, rewards and frustrations, the ethics. Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Bad Santa, I Love You Phillip Morris) do a grand job of portraying what life is like inside what the reporters call “the Kabubble”.
There are few nods to life outside as well, but this is essentially one American woman’s tale of a search for meaning in her life. That makes it sound a little like Eat, Pray, Love with bullets and to a large extent it is. While admirably clear-eyed and convincing on some things (how heavily Kim relies on her local fixer, for example), it reaches too easily for the kind of contrivances the movies like to indulge in, and loses its edge as a result. As Barker herself told CBS News, the film is “not exactly true, but it's truthy”.
Surrounding Fey and Freeman is a cast that includes Billy Bob Thornton, playing a hard-boiled US general and adding nicely to the cynicism level, Margot Robbie as Kim’s fellow war reporter, and Alfred Molina as an Afghan politician.
This is first and last Fey’s show, however, and she gives it her all. Like the Saturday Night Live sketches that made her name, the film does not know quite when to call it a day and at 112 minutes it overstays its welcome. Plenty of inventive, winning Fey touches, though, including a military exercise carried out to Harry Nilsson’s Without You. Without Fey, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot would be a dull show.
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