Real life ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ journalist out of her element at premiere

Boasting the fish-way-out-of-water nature of Private Benjamin and M.A.S.H.’s absurdity and grotesquerie of battle, the comedy (*** out of four; rated R; in theaters nationwide Friday) tries to get real about embedded journalists in “the suck” of mid-2000s Afghanistan. She gets the opportunity to find out when she’s offered a position reporting from Afghanistan in 2004, for what’s initially meant to be three months. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot could have used some 30 Rock wit”, they said, and Entertainment Weekly weren’t entirely convinced by Fey’s character Kim Baker: ‘Fey leans hard – too hard, early on – on Kim’s cluelessness and her own wry, self-aware Fey-ness’. If anything, Fey is saying that the continued pay gap between male and female performers is what’s keeping the era that brought us such content as Girls, Broad City and even Sisters and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to life. And it will surely be criticized for casting white actors as key Afghan characters. But by making the fantasy of proving oneself by heading off to a foreign war its central theme, then taking an honest look at some of the messier ethical dilemmas that lurk beneath that narrative, the film lopes into some surprisingly complicated and thought-provoking territory. It wobbles in terms of an authentic feel, yet there’s no doubt Fey succeeds in her most serious big-screen outing yet. It’s like she’s even lost her NY smarts when she takes out a wad of American cash on a busy Kabul street. There, she meets Tanya Vanderpoel (Margot Robbie), a respected journalist who likes to cut loose when she isn’t on-camera.

Tina Fey plays a cable news producer who travels to, of all places, war-torn Afghanistan to get out of a personal and professional rut in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot“, an erratic comedy featuring Margot Robbie, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina and Billy Bob Thornton.

Paramount Pictures presents a film directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa and written by Robert Carlock. Numerous laughs come from subtitles translating the local language Baker inevitably misunderstands.

Ultimately, Baker faces two challenges in the film: the farfetched one of rescuing her boyfriend from Taliban kidnappers, and the more realistic one of not finding an audience for news from what one soldier she interviews describes as a “forgotten war, capital F, capital W”.

As newspapers have closed and news conglomerates grown, realistic portrayals of the people who gather news are critical to the survival of journalism as a democratic institution.

Unfortunately, “WTF“, like “EPL”, veers into romantic territory that diminishes the story of its central character.