Movie review: ‘Rock the Kasbah’

In 2007, two women — Lema Sahar and Setara Hussainzada — made it onto the stage of Afghan Star, a Kabul-based American Idol knockoff that became extremely popular in Afghanistan. Yet, for all the sense of freedom it might have represented, it still had to conform to the mores of a conservative Islamic society. Most of the singers were men, and dancing was frowned upon.

So when Hussainzada’s head scarf slipped and she slightly moved to the music, it sent shock waves through the country and sparked so many death threats she had to flee into hiding.

Now, that might be the starting point for a movie worth watching — in fact, Hussainzada’s story makes it into a 2009 documentary, also called Afghan Star — but that’s not the way Hollywood producers think. They have to strain her experience through the sieve of an American viewpoint, turn it into something vaguely resembling a comedy, cast some grizzled boomers for name recognition, give it a mawkish, Kumbaya climax, and slap on a title of an old Clash song that everyone will recognize.

The result, Rock the Kasbah, does not rock at all — not even a little bit.

Bill Murray plays Richie Lanz, an L.A. music manager whose career has seen better days. His best client is his assistant, Ronnie (a stupefyingly unfunny Zooey Deschanel), whose appearance at a dive bar attracts the attention of a drunk guy in the crowd who also happens to book USO tours of Afghanistan.

Faster than you can say “Kandahar,” they’re on the plane, where Ronnie’s jitters about performing in the midst of war get the best of her. By the time they land, she’s in full panic mode and persuades a strange mercernary named Bombay Brian (a grating Bruce Willis) to get her out of the country. Trouble is, she has taken Richie’s passport and cash.

To make some money, Richie hooks up with two black-market losers (Scott Caan and Danny McBride, both unfunny) who sell bullets to a local Pashtun tribe. Once he’s in the village, Richie stumbles across Salima (Leem Lubany), the chief’s daughter, who secretly sings Western pop songs in a cave.

Richie thinks she could be his ticket back into the big leagues. Along with his trusty taxi driver/sidekick Daoud (Beejan Land), he takes her to Kabul to appear on Afghan Star. Needless to say, this outrages many, including her father.

This is where Rock the Kasbah becomes somewhat more involving, but this is a full hour into the film.

While Murray shows flashes of his laconic intelligence, he’s mostly wasted. Similarly misused is Lubany, who made a striking debut in the 2013 Palestinian film Omar.

But it’s Kate Hudson as a prostitute named Merci who gives Kasbah its most inexplicable moments. It’s almost as if screenwriter Mitch Glazer (Scrooged, also with Bill Murray) realized at the last minute that he had to squeeze in an American female character but didn’t know what to do with her.

Like Richie, director Barry Levinson has had much better moments, including Rain Man and Good Morning, Vietnam. Kasbah has little in common with them.

Far better than wasting 100 minutes of one’s life on Kasbah is tracking down the documentaries Afghan Star and The Network, the latter about Tolo TV, the independent Afghan station whose employees reportedly have run a gantlet of threats and harassment for its programming, including the original Afghan Star series.

There aren’t any bold-face names in either film but their stories are so compelling they don’t need them. What a concept.

This story was originally published October 22, 2015 at 10:21 AM with the headline "Movie review: ‘Rock the Kasbah’."