'Whiskey Tango Foxtrot' - Movie Review

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be a war correspondent, wonder no more. I say this with absolutely no authority, but the base material is written by a war correspondent and it has a certain ... ring of truth to it. Tina Fey plays Kim Baker (a woman called Kim Barker wrote The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan about her time as a war correspondent), a woman disillusioned with her life as a television news writer who suddenly decides that she's going to take that offer to work news in Afghanistan. There she finds herself unprepared for the danger and the way women must behave in a very Muslim country, but rapidly takes to the rowdy and hard-partying lifestyle of the other correspondents. After initial success (fueled by her balls of steel, taking a camera and running toward a gunfight), things taper off as the network shows less and less interest in airing depressing stories of soldiers in war. Much humour is made of her fish-out-of-water status in the first half of the movie, but it gets more serious toward the end (without giving up entirely on the humour). I thought the first half was a bit too light-weight, but it wrapped up surprisingly well: I'm glad I watched it.