Rock the Kasbah review: This film is so flat, it makes Bill Murray seem criminally boring

In 1987 Dustin Hoffman starred in Ishtar, a comedy about an American artist on a downward spiral traveling to a Middle Eastern country to find inspiration and regain popularity. It was universally panned by critics and is still referred to as one of the biggest Hollywood disasters of all time. Fast forward twenty years and we have a rehash of Ishtar named Rock the Kasbah, with Bill Murray as the lead, and exactly the same results.

Murray plays Richie Lanz, a once famous music manager who is now living off money from rich wannabe singers with zero talent. His only real talent is his own secretary (Zooey Deschanel) with whom he gets a chance to go to Afghanistan to entertain US soldiers. The secretary, too scared to perform in Afghanistan, bails out with his passport and the old man is stuck in the country. He uses his time to travel around with a mercenary (Bruce Willis), hang out with a prostitute (Kate Hudson), understand the local culture and discover a young farm girl (Leem Lubany) whose voice may help his burgeoning business.

Despite the whole ‘discovering Afghanistan’ undercurrent there is nothing insightful in the film. Director Barry Levinson, famous for Young Sherlock Holmes, Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam, more or less sticks to showcasing the exotica of Afghanistan through a white man’s lens. For example, the prostitute named Merci stays in a trailer somewhere in the Afghanistan desert without a shred of poverty. It’s something only an ignorant white man would think exists in a third world country.

The film is supposed to be based on a true story of a Pashtun woman who broke the country’s cultural norms and sang on the Afghan Star show, but we never get to this plot until the very end of the film. The majority of the film is spent in Murray’s character being bitchy, generally irritable and indulging in stupid things. This makes Richie’s big change of personality after visiting Afghanistan manipulative and also corny.

The film’s biggest problem is not that it is offensive on many levels on multiple occasions, but that it is incredibly unfunny. None of Murray’s rock bottom ignominy is amusing at any instance. Most of his dialogue seems to have been improvised on set, because it’s so terrible you won’t believe a major studio would have gone through the script and confirmed it.

When Bill Murray is boring, there’s something seriously wrong with the direction and the script. Writer Mitch Glazer wrote and directed another terrible film called Passion Play a few years ago so the hodge podge style of this film’s script is not entirely surprising. Since Wag the Dog back in 1997 director Levinson has made a string of awful movies including this one, which indicates his filmmaking sensibility is still stuck in the 80’s and early 90’s.

That probably explains the barrage of stereotypes in the film. You get Deschanel playing the same quirky character she’s done so many times, you get Willis playing the no nonsense tough guy, you also get some Afghan mercenaries on horses with guns being mined for comedy because of their lack of knowledge on the West. The film didn’t cost as much as Ishtar did twenty years ago, but with Rock the Kasbah we have a new Middle East exotica disaster to reference for the next twenty years.