Well, damn.
Who’d have guessed that the best combat thriller about the evacuation and fall of Kabul, Afghanistan would be Hungarian, and about Hungarian NATO troops battling to get Hungarian nationals and embassy staff out of that benighted country?
“Operation Kabul” — more dramatically titled “Dragons over Kabul” (“Sárkányok Kabul felett”) in Hungarian — is about the last couple of days that the airport was open, and is an edge of your seat thriller about soldiers airlifted into chaos and hoping for the best.
It’s got in-your-face combat, suspense and melodramatic pathos all swirling through the maelstrom of collapse.
The Trump Administration politics and blunders which caused the debacle are cast aside as the focus is narrowed to the Hungarian NATO unit sent in to secure a tiny piece of airport tarmac to try and get “our people” out.
“We can’t save everyone” is a given, but eventually somebody’ll have to say it out loud (in subtitled Hungarian and Pashto, and English).
But there’s this one Hungarian doctor (Blanka Mészáro) “who thinks she’s Mother Teresa” who misses her bus and mucks up the works. There’s your melodrama. Because as flashbacks reveal, Lt. Bálint (Gábor Jászberényi) has a connection to her.
Will he and his hand-picked trio of troopers be able to track her down and “extract” her, by any means necessary?
“Operation Kabul” is a genre combat thriller, start to finish. As such films aren’t given many surprises, the important element is execution. And this one immerses us in this world of gunfire, panic and political murders by the vengeful Taliban, who ride their 5000 released POW fighters into town for a mass bloodletting.
Characters face life and death decisions and dilemmas — gates to the airport mobbed with desperate civilians who worked for various NATO governments and will surely be murdered if they’re left behind, children trapped in the violence, officers trying to focus on the narrow parameters of the “mission” while their subordinates badger them into doing more.
The performances are sturdy and steadfast, the emotions subdued and the twists mostly unsurprising and only a tad far-fetched. Zsombor Dyga’s (“Köntörfalak”) direction is precise and unfussy, the editing (by Béla Barsi and Julia Hack) by is crisp and close to breathless.
And what’s the bottom line in any genre pic, combat films included? Do we buy in? Does it play?
“Operation Kabul” answers both those questions in Hungarian, with subtitles. Affirmative!
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Gábor Jászberényi,
Blanka Mészáros, Dávid Hajmási, Nóra Trokán,
Szilveszter Pálinkás,
Gusztáv Dietz and
Tamás Borovics
Credits: Directed by Zsombor Dyga, scripted by Áron Horváth. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:37
