Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - D

​Quick Hit: Tonally a mess, I could never quite figure out what I was watching, and why I still was

From what I remember, this movie was marketed as a comedy. However, it very quickly convinces you that it isn’t (despite starring Tina Fey). There’s nothing specifically wrong about that – I just dislike when marketing campaigns are put together by people that have obviously never seen the movie, and so they pull together what they think are clips that may represent the movie.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a movie that follows American journalist (Kim Barker) as she travels to Afghanistan for the Forgotten War. That is essentially the most powerful part of the movie – when Kim first gets there, she seems to have a passion for it, and interviews different Marines as they deal with the fact that America essentially forgot they were there.

This fact hit home – my brother is a Marine, and I’m always so proud that he gave up years of his life away from family and friends to serve.

For you little brother!

However, after that, we basically begin our giant tonal mix. We dive into the “Kabubble”, where we see that the different people living in Kabul over the long term quickly become accustomed to a world where they live by different rules than everyone else. This giant shift occurs when Margot Robbie asks Kim if she can sleep with her security guards. I’m not sure what happened here, but then Martin Freeman shows up, and he is essentially a freelance photographer living in the Kabubble, and of course, he wants to have sex with Kim.

Then we are back to military times, where there are explosions, people dying, all the time being white-washed by casting the Afghani parts with whites like Alfred Molina. I don’t necessarily think that everyone should play only their race – I think it allows people to step into other people’s shoes, which ultimately can be a good thing for people to understand each more deeply. However, here, Alfred Molina comes across almost … phobic of the race. And he plays up his role way too much.

This guy was good but looks just like JON SNOW! You know nothing JON SNOW!

Not that all the acting is bad in this film – I actually think most of it is decent at times, if unremarkable. My main problem was just that there didn’t seem to be any way to keep up with the tonal shifts. If they ​​kept to a single storyline (either Kim’s romantic life or the Forgotten War), the movie would have been better, if not downright good. But alas, sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.

The effects were pretty good – there were some very convincing body parts flying around, and at times I wanted to like the characters quite a bit more than I actually did. Overall, this movie isn’t very good, but that isn’t because it didn’t have the pieces to be.

​I am going to go forward with a “D”.

For more on this film, check out IMDB.