Bill Murray, probably at his least charming, plays Richie Lanz, a selfish, irritatingly loudmouthed, out-of-luck music manager. Spouting off tall tales of his decades in the trenches, depending on who he’s conning, he’ll either claim to have discovered Madonna or to have convinced Hendrix to play the star spangled banner at woodstock. He has only one real client, Ronnie(Zooey Deschanel), a cover-singer-slash-secretary, with prospects so bleak, that when a whisky drenched customer at a karaoke bar suggests he take her on a USO tour of Afghanistan, Richie books the next flight to Kabul.
On their arrival, Ronnie takes one look at the blownup cityscape and flees, along with Richie’s money and passport. Lanz, who rarely responds to a situation in a recognizable human way, faces his dilemma by going on a night out with two salesman turned gun runners(Scott Caan, Danny McBride) in a convertible, smoking weed, across Kabul. At the heavily fortified disco, Richie meets the sexy, and direct, Merci(Kate Hudson), a one-woman brothel, who goes on to be one of his unlikely friends in this part of the world. The next day, he is jumped by a steely faced mercenary (Bruce Willis), who wants the remainder of his fee promised by Ronnie for smuggling her out of Afghanistan. Out of options, broke, and with no intention of dying, he takes the job of doing an ammunition supply run down to the rural Paktia province, accompanied by his trusty companion, the disco-loving, unpaid driver-interpreter(Arian Moayed). At the drop off, his eccentricity intrigues the chief of the village who invites him for dinner, where he first hears the mellifluous voice of Salima(Leem Lubany), practicing a Cat Stevens song in a cave away from the village. This is where Richie’s blind ambition to succeed and Salima’s love for singing which is forbidden in her culture, gets the plot rolling.
Of course, by now, the dreariness of the loose script has the some of the audience wondering if they should leave or just watch till the end, hoping for some scene to entertain them enough just so the price of admission won’t feel like a total waste. In a classic story telling mistake, the movie leaves no character that the audience would root for, or get connected to. Well, besides not liking Murray’s character perhaps. A few good songs are dotted across sequences but not enough to redeem the lack of entertainment that is the finished product. It is probably one of the biggest disappointments to hit the screens in 2015. The best, if the only satisfactory moment, is watching Ritchie get shot during one his rockstar styled negotiations, keep an eye out for that one. If you’re thinking of watching, just wait for it come out on TV or the internet, at least you can change to something else or skip forward when you get bored.
