A more brainless (and aimless) cousin to Guy Ritchie's excellent "The Covenant" with almost the same plot and themes, "Kandahar" tries to be both your typical Gerard Butler action film on a bit grander scale* and serious Middle Eastern political thriller in vein of Peter Berg's "The Kingdom" and hardly succeeds in any of those.
Yet, it has few solid action sequences (including a proper one at night, which is extremally hard to film and even harder to watch) and…
Rewatching this after GotG Vol. 3 and it clearly shows that James Gunn is making one type of movie again, again and again - here it's just extra bloody and mean, but not far from (in fact, almost identical to) GotG.
At least you can appreciate all the beautiful shots and myriad of details that went into each frame.
If you are a horror fan, go out and support our brother James Wan who just spent all his "Aquaman" and "Furious 7" studio credit on one batshit insane horror flick like no other! It has it all - giallo and 80-ies slashers, 90-ies supernatural cop shows and much more plays like feature length non-mythological "The X-Files" episode, sans Mulder & Scully, but done on "The Conjuring" technical level. And, above all, it's just SO. MUCH. FUN! (especially if you get all the homages)
Short version:
If UPGRADE were a slasher-horror, it would be MALIGNANT.
A perfectly executed lesson in world-building, stunt-staging, editing and non-stop suspense from the (mad) mastermind George Miller also serves as a huge middle-finger to modern-day action "products" - it's fast, brutal, violent and, at times, utterly mad.
We needed a film like this, and we got it - I'm not sure yet if I need a sequel, I just want to see this one again (and again) to soak in all the details!
