Movie Review: 'Rock the Kasbah'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Rock the Kasbah is a curious comedy that drops rock names galore, then crashes on the rocks.
It's the story – inspired by real events, as they say -- of a down-on-his-luck rock manager from Van Nuys, California named Richie Lanz, played by Bill Murray, who takes the only client who is still with him on a USO tour of Afghanistan.
But Richie soon turns up in war-torn Kabul, ditched in the desert alone, broke, and without a passport. Somehow, he's got to raise some money.
That's when he discovers a young girl, Salima Khan, played by Leem Lubany, a Pashtun teenager with an extraordinary singing voice who lives in a cave.
He becomes her manager – for a 20-percent commission -- and guides her through the competition on the popular television show, Afghan Star, Afghanistan's version of American Idol, and helps her achieve her dream of becoming the first woman ever to compete on national television in Afghanistan.
Veteran, Oscar-winning (Rain Man) director Barry Levinson (Diner, Bugsy, Good Morning Vietnam, Avalon, Sleepers, Wag the Dog, The Natural) has rounded up a marquee-enhancing supporting ensemble, including Bruce Willis as a trigger-happy mercenary, Zooey Deschanel as Richie's assistant and the drugged-out rock starlet who abandons him, Kate Hudson as a helpful and agreeable prostitute, and Danny McBride and Scott Caan as manipulative war profiteers.
But none of them gets the chance to create a credible charater.. Mostly, they just sit around listlessly and wait for their next opportunity to chime in and somehow contribute to this misguided project.
For Levinson, this would seem to be a companion piece to his Good Morning Vietnam, which was built around Robin Williams in the same way that Rock the Kasbach is huilt around Murray.
But Murray's character, delivering his familiar, ain't-he-awful-until-he's-not deadpan character arc, doesn't come close to ringing true in any way and resonance is nowhere to be found.
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 fictional-account screenplay by Mitch Glazer (who wrote 1988's Scrooged! for Murray), which would seem to be about America's continued presence in Afghanistan, never materializes. Oh, it takes a run – well, a trot --at the obvious culture-clash situation, but – strangely -- just about ignores the people and the culture that their protagonist finds himself encountering. Thus we find no reason to care about the outcome. Abandoned narrative threads dangle from the film's spine like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
As for the title, it comes from a 1982 song by The Clash and has no more of a connection to the goings-on than anything else.
So we'll belt out 1½ stars out of 4 for the sputtering rock'n-roll road comedy, Rock the Kasbah, a misfire in which Bill Murray's patented insincerity emerges from just about every frame of the film itself.
