Laughs MIA in ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’

There’s a war on. Let’s party.

And so they do in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”

Oh, do they ever.

Bop till you drop, boogie till you puke is the order of the evenings for hard-living Western war correspondents in dusty Kabul, Afghanistan, during the early 2000s, dancing with desperate abandon until a bomb goes off somewhere. And then it’s time to sober up, strap on a flak vest, grab a camera and run out to capture the carnage.

File the footage, fall into gin-soaked slumbers and then ... why, then party again. And again. Rinse and repeat.

Strange movie. And despite the presence of Tina Fey playing its lead character, a cable TV reporter named Kim Baker, it’s not a funny one, contrary to the impression given by the picture’s trailer, whose footage is carefully edited to offer the promise of yoks. Adapted from “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” a 2011 memoir by real-life former Chicago Tribune correspondent Kim Barker, it yo-yos between alcohol-soaked party sequences and scenes of Baker (the filmmakers dropped the first “r” in the character’s last name) convoying and helicoptering with the troops, interviewing Afghans (a glaring warlord, a lascivious bureaucrat) and repeatedly blundering heedlessly into dangerous situations.

When there’s a firefight, she runs toward it. When there’s a mob of fundamentalist Muslim men angrily railing against Western technology, she, disguised in a burqa, makes a beeline to their midst. Those episodes are inventions of the filmmakers (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa directed from a screenplay by Robert Carlock), and in them Baker comes across as careless and stupid.

Another invented sequence, in which she blackmails a high-ranking Afghan official into disclosing information that Baker turns over to the U.S. military to assist in the rescue of a Westerner held captive by the Taliban, reveals she’s unethical.

The concentration of “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (militaryspeak for “WTF,” which means exactly what you think it does) on the carousing and on the dismal details of Baker’s rocky love life, in which her paramours are either peevish or unfaithful (or both), contributes to a pervasive sense of sourness. Baker is not very sympathetic, and neither, with very few exceptions, is anybody else onscreen.

It’s ugly American time in Kabul.

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 2:39 AM with the headline "Laughs MIA in ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’."