Review

Adapted from Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel The Kite Runner,  this new film is brisk and bland. But its blandness might work at the box office, where movies in which little boys get raped don’t tend to pack in the crowds. (Gone Baby Gone never caught fire, even with all the acclaim.) It’s hard to find fault with director Marc Forster’s work. Although the western-China locations don’t match the wild-and-woolly Afghanistan of our imaginations, they’re perfectly acceptable, and Alberto Iglesias’s score gives Eastern exoticism a Western pulse. Khalid Abdalla plays the grown-up novelist hero, Amir, with just the right shade of wariness: You don’t hate him for wanting to work through his traumas on the page rather than with his fists—that’s who he is. As his brave, somewhat aloof father, Homayoun Ershadi has enough stature to survive David Benioff’s almost-too-efficient screenplay. (You can practically hear the stopwatch ticking—“Bring the movie in at two hours, boys!”) The only maladroit bit of dialogue comes when Amir’s wife (Atossa Leoni) receives the news that her husband is going to Afghanistan on the same day boxes with his first novel arrive: “Is it safe? What about your book tour?” (For some reason it made me think of Groucho’s “Will you marry me? Did he leave you any money? Answer the second question first.”) The Afghan boys’ kite-flying contests are the emotional core of the film, and Forster and his crew bring the camera into the sky and make it dip and soar along with the kites. It’s a thrilling spectacle, although it’s also tinged with a peculiarly emasculating aggression: The goal is to wrap your string around your opponent’s string and cut off his kite. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (12/11/06)