More times than not I’ve liked Tina Fey more than the films she’s been in. Baby Mama and Date Night were hit-and-miss affairs, their best moments saved by the comedienne’s deft timing, while Sisters, though very funny, conveyed the sense that she was slumming a bit. My suspicion is that Hollywood simply doesn’t know what to do with a smart, sexy, confident 40-something brunette, which is really not a surprise.
Unfortunately, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is not the movie where we finally get to see Fey toiling in the service of a script worthy of her talent. No, this disjointed, spotty account of journalist Kim Barker’s time covering the war in Afghanistan is a film that squanders the talent it has at its disposal, as it’s in dire need of a quality editor who can make some sense of the random episodes we see Barker embroiled in.
Tired of producing stories for a New York news station, Barker (Fey) is ready for a change, though she certainly couldn’t have expected what was about to fall in her lap in 2003. What with nearly all of the veteran foreign correspondents covering the second Iraq War, her station is strapped for reporters to cover the conflict in Afghanistan. Barker volunteers to do just that, for what she’s told is a three-month stint. Three years later she’s still at it, doing her level best to deliver stories about a war no one cares about and keeping her head down so it isn’t shot off.
The three years the film covers is made up of random events and stories Barker covers with a cast of recurring characters that drop in and out of the story as the plot dictates. Tanya Vanderpoel (Margot Robbie) is a veteran reporter and ultimate rival of Barker’s; General Hollanek (an effective, restrained Billy Bob Thornton) is the military commander she must go through, whose respect she ultimately wins; Ian MacKelpie (Martin Freeman) is a Scottish photographer she grows to love; and Ali Massoud Sadiiq (Alfred Molina) is Afghanistan’s secondin-command who has his own designs on Barker.
While Ficarra and Requa’s intent may have been to recreate the sense of chaos, skewing of time and constant insanity that made up Barker’s experience, it does not make for compelling filmmaking. An incident is reported on and dispatched, another pops up, and so it goes. There is little or no connection between one incident and another and the result is a sense of randomness that prevents the film from building any momentum or viewers to become invested in Barker’s plight. The closest thing the movie has to a narrative through-line is the relationship that forms between our heroine and MacKelpie, a tentative love story that only comes into play during the film’s long last hour and is more of an excuse for the directors to put Barker in harm’s way rather than give us an emotional anchor to hold onto.
What with the veteran cast assembled here, it comes as no surprise that the acting is top-notch. Thornton always commands the screen whenever he appears and the scenes between him and Fey are so good it had me wishing they were in a better movie. Freeman and Molina provide some much needed comic relief, while Robbie continues to serve notice that she’s much more than just a pretty face, giving us an assured turn as a woman who can give as good as she gets in an arena dominated by men.
In the end, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot proves an apt title for this production as it wanders about with little purpose, occasionally coming into focus only to fade into confusion again and again.
