Whiskey Tango Foxtrot should have been called How Tina Fey Got Her Groove Back in Afghanistan. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has the grim veneer of the Afghanistan War, but the vibe of a chick movie about empowerment and finding love and success. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot briefly addresses how the news industry is motivated by ratings, not the importance or gravity of a conflict, and how a woman reporter can uncover things that a male reporter cannot. Also there is no sister solidarity, and women are backstabbing bitches.
I have no idea if Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a faithful adaptation of Kim Barker’s memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I will read it one day and find out. Recently female reporters such as Suki Kim have complained that their investigative work is trivialized and recast as a journey of self-discovery. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot rides the incompetent female who can’t find a place to pee trope hard. Even I would know not to carry an orange backpack in a war zone and who holds money like that? No one does, and if you do, where are you from and are you an adult? Barker worked in Chicago and NYC so I hope that those incidents did not happen in her life.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has a great cast. I adore Margot Robbie, Billy Bob Thornton and Cherry Jones. Side note: I don’t care for Martin Freeman. People seem to love him. I don’t hate him, but he is British, and normally I’m an Anglophile so for me to be underwhelmed by his presence is a damning factor, and he plays Fey’s love interest.
After all the diversity complaints being lodged at Hollywood, particularly at Fey for The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s depiction of Native Americans and Asian people, Fey doubles down like a Fox talk show host and casts white people in the major Afghan roles. I can theoretically understand why you would want Alfred Molina because he is a big name, but while Christopher Abbott did a great job as the gentle handler, were audiences really going to throw their money at him?
I feel like Tyra Banks in America’s Next Top Model when she yelled at a contestant, “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this. When my mother yells at me like this, it is because she loves me. I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you? Learn something from this! When you go to bed at night, you lay there, and you take responsibility for yourself because no one is going to take responsibility for you. You rolling your eyes acting like you’ve heard it all before.” Tina Fey is too smart and gifted to put out this kind of work and to not learn from her mistakes. If she isn’t going to do better in her depictions of groups that she is not familiar with, at least can she not trivialize women’s work? Apparently she cannot.
I wanted to like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and am relieved that I did not go to theaters to watch it. My mom walked out of the room before it ended, and her standards are pretty low. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is only for hardcore fans of the cast.