The more movies that Tina Fey makes, the less I like her. It’s not that Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was bad. I’d say it was a middle of the road effort. I just think like with many things Tina Fey put out recently, it could have been better.
In this, Tina stars as journalist Kim Baker, who takes a change of career covering the war in Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The movie is based on Barker’s own memoire about being a correspondent in Afghanistan when the world’s attention had already turned to Iraq.
While I often complain that many Hollywood movies based off of memories go too far off script (American Sniper, anyone?) my main complaint in this one is it didn’t seem to have a script. It felt so disjointed, like a series of vignettes with no unifying theme, other than ‘war sucks’ and ‘no one cares about Afghanistan anymore.’
Well, I’m sorry journalists, but by the time Iraq came around, I was all warred out. Sue me.
Even Tina Fey’s talent can’t really make this live up to the hype that it got. It really just feels like a war correspondent’s diary where they complain about all the scary work they do, while everyone ignores their stories to blow up the internet with pictures of Kim Kardashian’s ass.
While this movie is seeing some early good reviews from critics, I have to say that its far more likely due to Tina Fey’s likability rather than the likeability of this movie. It’s not a particularly hard hitting film for such a topic, which is fine. If you want to parody, go with parody. If you want to be serious be serious. It feels like they were going for half and half ala MASH but wound up with a mishmash.
Terrible jokes aside, it’s a clichéd movie about a journalist in a war zone learning about themselves at the same time they can’t learn that the American public has the attention span of baby goldfish. It doesn’t matter if you’re covering Godzilla attacking the Empire State Building, we stop paying attention after awhile.
It just felt like there was no real point to this movie. Much like Bakers “white lady reason for being there” this movie feels like a halfhearted effort to put out a female empowerment/self-discovery movie.
It fell flat for me, despite Fey’s best efforts. Even her character seemed poorly managed, transforming overnight from a wide eyed new kid on the block to a hard bitten journalist is a bit far-fetched. You’d assume that anyone electing to go to a war zone would be a bit worldly to start.
This is more of a watch it at home because you love Tina Fey movie. With no real point, and such a disjointed timeline, this movie felt like a very stylish documentary with no narration and no insight. Yes, the war in Afghanistan sucks. What are we going to do about it? I’m sorry, but I don’t think the message we should be getting from Afghanistan is “it’s a great place for middle-aged white chicks to find themselves.” Seems irresponsible.
WE GAVE IT: 2 Stars – Watch the Official Trailer and Official Movie Poster below!
