Rock the Kasbah

Rock the Kasbah stars Bill Murray as Richie Lanz, a washed up rock music manager who takes his last remaining client, struggling singer/songwriter Ronnie (Zooey Deschanel), on a USO tour of Afghanistan.  But Ronnie splits with Richie’s money and passport before the first gig, and Richie is left alone in a hostile country. Fortunately, he discovers a new talent who just might be able to rejuvenate his faltering career.  The story is loosely based on the 2009 documentary Afghan Star, which follows four contestants on the Afghan equivalent of American Idol. Thus Rock the Kasbah is part of a growing trend of Hollywood studios turning powerful documentaries into mediocre fiction films—like this year’s The Walk, Our Brand Is In Crisis, and Freeheld. But Rock the Kasbah is the worst of these movies I’ve yet seen. In addition to its mild racism and fake feminism, it’s most objectionable for being a terribly unfunny comedy. If you were to take Elaine May’s much maligned Ishtar (1987) and extricate all the amusing dialogue, replace Paul Williams’ hilarious original songs with flimsy Cat Stevens covers, and remove the pleasure of watching Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty each playing against type, you’d be left with something approximating Rock the Kasbah.

What’s so surprising about the levels of badness in this movie is the talent on and behind the screen. In addition to the always-watchable Murray, the cast includes other actors I enjoy seeing even in subpar projects, like Kate Hudson and Bruce Willis.  Screenwriter Mitch Glazer is a talented scribe whose credits include the adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1998) and Scrooged (1988)—the latter of which was also a Bill Murray vehicle.  But the direction by Barry Levinson is perhaps the biggest disappointment. What happened to this guy? After making one of the most impressive writing/directing débuts in cinema history—Diner (1982)— he went on to make the well-crafted Hollywood blockbusters The Natural (1984) and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), then returned to small, autobiographical Diner territory with the even more self-assured Tin Men (1987) (one of my 100 favorite films), scored a major critical and commercial triumph with Good Morning, Vietnam (also 1987), and won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for the preeminent Rain Man (1988). He then sank into a morass of overwrought pretentiousness with Avalon (1990), Bugsy (1991), Toys (1992), Disclosure (1994), Sleepers (1996), and Wag the Dog (1997), and comic misfires like Jimmy Hollywood (1994), Bandits (2001), Man of the Year (2006), and now this, his weakest movie yet.

Murray, on the other hand, is able to transcend even his worst projects, or at least he emerges from them totally unscathed.  Rock the Kasbah is no exception. We should hate watching him coast through tedious dreck like this, but somehow we don’t. Perhaps Murray’s laidback screen presence is bulletproof because he seems to bring as much (or as little?) commitment to pictures he’s deeply invested in—like The Razor's Edge (1984), Quick Change (1990), and Lost in Translation (2003)—as he does to movies he clearly thinks are beneath him—like Meatballs (1979), Kingpin (1996), and Garfield: The Movie (2004). We just like watching Bill Murray. Therefor, even though I’ll be surprised if Rock the Kasbah doesn’t wind up as the second lowest entry on my list of 2015’s films, I still enjoyed it about twice as much as the movie at the very bottom of that list.