‘Rock The Kasbah’ (no spoiler) review

Thankfully, Murray wakes up, and the movie gets a little better.

Levinson’s appreciation of improvisation is on display to a glaring fault, and Levinson and Murray seem to get lost in the desert after taking an agonizingly long time to establish the convoluted premise involving the female pioneer, which they never seem very interested in anyway. The morning after inspires the film’s only laugh, and a cheap one at that.

“Rock the Kasbah” is a debacle, but it’s not your everyday cinematic disaster. Somebody find this man a better script reader. You literally don’t know where it’s going or how it gets there, and in this case, the there is an underground club in Kabul, where Richie Lanz (Murray), a once-prominent rock tour manager from Van Nuys, has ended up, penniless and without a passport. And yes she is, except she disappears nearly immediately. Directed by the once-reliable Barry Levinson and written by Mitch Glazer, “Rock the Kasbah” tosses characters in and out of the film with random abandon.

Danny McBride (THIS IS THE END), and Scott Caan (HAWAII FIVE-0).

Murray, however, hangs around, flailing about with minimal assistance from Levinson, Glazer or his co-stars – the shared scenes between him and Willis” mercenary are about as far from their “Moonrise Kingdom” showdowns as possible – and generally embarrassing himself in ways reminiscent of his mid-to-late “90s run.

This woman’s story, and the larger story of “Afghan Star”, the televised singing competition that emerged in the wake of Taliban rule, into which Murray’s Lanz enters his discovery, are worth telling in a narrative picture.

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: The gaps between the hipster comedy of the star, the incipient sentimentality of the story and the gravely depressing reality of the setting provide tonal abysses simply too vast to bridge in Rock the Kasbah, an intermittently amusing but dramatically problematic mish-mash that careens all over a rough and rocky road. Kate Hudson’s character’s story, for example, about a blonde Southern belle and prostitute named Merci stationed in a double-wide on the outskirts of Kabul trying to make enough money to start a real estate business in Hawaii, is such a goldmine, it’s surprising someone else didn’t make it into a movie first; it deserves a fuller, richer telling.

“Rock the Kasbah” is bad; “Bone Tomahawk” manages to be worse. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty (cast against type) were incompetent singer-songwriters who took a leap of faith for what they think will be a musical tour of the Middle East. Ishtar has finally begun to overcome its bad reputation and enchant audiences as a buddy movie that’s amusing and also happens to be an astute political satire.

So, four guys ride off to save the day, right?

The film’s biggest problem is not that it is offensive on many levels on multiple occasions, but that it is incredibly unfunny. Of the many war crimes associated with the last few decades in Afghanistan, from a strictly rhetorical point of view that one’s up there in terms of egregiousness. A pretty or familiar or appealing face does not a good movie make. But at the same time that they can’t be blamed, the actors can’t be trusted either.