WTF were they thinking?!
Tina Fey is fine, but film not sure if it’s a comedy, drama or romance
What the ...? Tina Fey has been cast as a war correspondent? Yes, really.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot — which, when translated from the military phonetic alphabet, means “what the f---” — is based on journalist Kim Barker’s bestselling memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, clearly, liberties have been taken.
For starters, forget Pakistan; the action takes place mostly in the apparent Afghan party town known as the “Kabubble,” where foreign news correspondents supposedly ran more of a risk of damaging their livers than other body parts by encountering landmines and missiles.
Fey gets serious. Sort of. And therein lies the film’s biggest conundrum: it’s not sure if it wants to be a comedy, a drama or a romance, and veers from genre to genre.
As Kim Baker, Fey plays a more debauched but no less cynical version of Liz Lemon, her wisecracking 30 Rock alter ego.
Baker is a disaffected TV news writer in New York in a dead-end relationship with her boyfriend. She wants to “shake it all up.”
So when the call comes that the brass is looking for an unmarried, childless soul to head to Afghanistan to be on camera, Baker signs on. She knows next to nothing about the country and its people, and undergoes immediate culture shock. Baker soon learns there is little appetite back home for news out of Afghanistan and Iraq is the new flavour du jour. So if a reporter wants serious face time on the tube, they had better come up with something explosive.
She is embedded with a marine unit led by a crusty general (Billy Bob Thornton), who, when not speaking in cryptic riddles, instructs her on the finer points of staying alive in the field.
But it’s staying alive at her journalist base that could prove more problematic, all the more so since Baker is one of the few female correspondents. Showing her the ropes is Tanya (Margot Robbie), an Aussie bombshell who has no trouble getting face time on the tube.
Trying to cheer Baker up, Tanya informs her that while she may be “a six or seven in New York,” here she’s a nine.
Also in the fray is charmingly degenerate Scottish photographer Iain (Martin Freeman), who, despite his lame come-on, manages to woo Baker.
While rarely dull, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is forever changing direction. It’s hard to figure what directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa were seeking here: Zero Dark Thirty? MASH? Casablanca? We get a soupçon of all of the above. Nonetheless, Fey is fine, as usual. So are Robbie, Freeman and Billy Bob.
But what the @#$% were the directors thinking in having Alfred Molina cast as the clownish and lascivious Afghan attorney general and minister of vice and virtue? And while Christopher Abbott’s role as Baker’s earnest translator is probably the most sympathetic character in the film, again, couldn’t they have found an actual Afghan to play the part?