119 min | R | May 26, 2023 | Open Road Films
A black-ops contractor blows up an Iranian nuclear site, gets exposed, and finds himself stranded in hostile territory with a translator he barely knows. The only way out is a long drive to Kandahar through every faction that wants him dead. The chase is real. The movie around it never catches up.
Tom Harris is a CIA contractor in the Middle East who sabotages an Iranian nuclear facility. A leak burns his identity. Now the Iranians, the Pakistani ISI, and a freelance assassin all know who he is and where he is. He has to reach an extraction point in Kandahar with his interpreter before any of them close the distance. The film wants to be a thriller about the human cost of covert war. It settles for being a thriller about driving across a desert.
Gerard Butler plays Harris with the worn-down competence he brings to every man-under-fire role. He runs, he shoots, he negotiates in clipped sentences, and he never overplays the exhaustion. Navid Negahban plays Mo, the interpreter, and he gives the film its only real interior life. Mo has a personal reason to be in the region, and Negahban makes that grief sit underneath every exchange with Harris. Travis Fimmel plays Roman Chalmers, a smirking handler back at the agency, and the part is a collection of mannerisms rather than a person. Ali Fazal plays the ISI operative Kahil Nasir with more menace than the script earns for him.
Ric Roman Waugh directs from a script by Mitchell LaFortune, a former intelligence analyst, and the procedural texture is the best thing here. The film stages a night chase lit only by the green wash of motorcycle headlights and night-vision optics, and the sequence finds a genuine disorientation that the daylight scenes lack. Waugh shoots the convoys and the desert in wide, flat compositions that emphasize how exposed Harris always is. The problem is the structure. LaFortune introduces four separate factions and then cross-cuts between them without building tension in any single thread.
The pieces are assembled with care and almost no urgency. Each faction gets its scenes, each scene advances the map, and the film mistakes that motion for momentum. The relationship between Harris and Mo is the one thread worth following, and the movie keeps cutting away from it to check in on people who never become characters. By the time the convoy reaches Kandahar, the geography is clear and the stakes are inert. This is a competent machine running a route it never makes you fear.