Rock the Kasbah

[StevePulaski]

Rock the Kasbah (2015)
Directed by: Barry Levinson

Bill Murray and Kate Hudson in Rock the Kasbah.

Rating: ★

If one watches a film classified as a comedy and doesn't laugh even once during the course of the film, it can be said that the film was an objective failure if its intention was to provoke laughs. If one watches a comedy, but doesn't find it funny, but rather insightful, satirical, contemplative, or meaningful, it has succeeded on another level that it may or may not have intended on which to succeed. Rock the Kasbah's first problem is that it recognizes it can be both - a comedy provoking laughs in addition to being rather insightful and eye-opening to a different culture. The film's end result, however, shows what occurs when the screenwriting and acting is far too slight and simple-minded to provoke laughs and the insights into culture so elitist and shortchanged that they come off as disrespectful.

Furthermore, a good Bill Murray performance, let alone the very blessing of finding one in the present, is hard to come by and to have his talent wasted in a monotonous slog of loosely related events that barely make for any narrative cohesion could almost be considered an affront to his legacy. Almost. Perhaps if the film was at least competent at being incompetent, it would've managed to even possess the ability to be offensively bad or damaging in some manner.

But alas, Rock the Kasbah combines the worst traits of a comedy - unfunny, forgettable, and boring - as it lumbers through setups for over a hundred minutes, subjecting Murray and his talents to nearly every one of them. The film revolves around his character Richie Lanza, a rock manager who allegedly worked with stars such as Eddie Money and helped propel them to stardom. In the present, however, he only manages one pop act who is about to go on tour in Afghanistan before she leaves Richie penniless and without his passport to return home in an act of sabotage.

Richie is stuck in Kabul with no means of getting home when he meets Salima Khan (Leem Lubany), an Afghani teenager with an amazing set of pipes who winds up going on Afghan Star, Afghanistan's own American Idol. Of course, this unheard of move for a female in Afghanistan sends traditionalist townspeople into a frenzy. Richie also winds up getting intimate with a local hooker (Kate Hudson) as he tries to secure Salima's place on national Television.

The film is actually the story of Setara Hussainzada, and to what minimal research I've done, the story seems to be marginally accurate. The issue is that Rock the Kasbah takes so long to get to what it's about and it doesn't give you anything to care about or empathize with in the meantime. If you solely based whether or not you were going to see this film on the trailer or the marketing campaign, you would've thought that the entire film was Bill Murray bumbling around Afghanistan, playing occasional shows, but largely just getting up in the face of and poking fun at culture.

In a move disrespectful to not only Leem Lubany as an actress - as if her character and her presence is an insignificant subplot of the film - but also Hussainzada and her story, it's as if Rock the Kasbah, which doesn't really have any central plot aside from undercooked, pale plot-strands, doesn't have the confidence in itself nor its audience to peddle what it's really about. Instead, you get a misrepresented, facile excuse for a comedy/drama that has no identity whatsoever and subjects its performers to an endless array of events that are either boring and misguided or unfunny and juvenile.

Watching Bill Murray parade around like a goof isn't funny. Watching Kate Hudson cheapen herself and her character into probably the safest portrayal of a hooker ever committed to film isn't funny nor interesting. The story positioned and written for Leem Lubany and the woman that inspired her is poorly handled and uninteresting, and Barry Levinson's (Good Morning, Vietnam, Wag the Dog) direction coupled with Mitch Glazer's (Scrooged) screenwriting winds up being so lifeless that the film either ostensibly needs CPR or a complete and utter rebuilding period where everything, and I mean everything, is entirely scrapped and overhauled.

Starring: Bill Murray, Leem Lubany, and Kate Hudson. Directed by: Barry Levinson.