Despite the rating you see to your left, the first ninety minutes of Marc Forster's The Kite Runner are not wholly unenjoyable. The film's subject matter and thematic overtones are too familiar and somewhat bland, but one can forgive the filmmakers for their earnest attempt. There is nothing here particularly remarkable, but there is nothing here particularly offensive. Had the film continued on the path on which it seemed to be, I certainly would not have felt cheated out of my time or money, though I also would not have recommended it to anyone.

The first two thirds of the film are just mediocre Hollywood drama, nothing to praise or get upset about. The last third of the film, however, ruins whatever was to be gotten out of the first section; it pulls out all the stops, throwing every plot twist in the book at us in an assault on our good taste and intelligence. Whatever dignity it had maintained over the last hour-and-a-half, whatever (little) restraint it had shown, is eschewed in favor of easy, manipulative dramatic turns that this reviewer found frustrating and almost condescending.

The Kite Runner sets a personal drama against the political history of a nation, an interesting narrative device that has been done much better elsewhere -- for instance, in the book and recent film Persepolis (2007), but also in classics like Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero, 1948) and The Last Emperor (1987). Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is an upper-class Afghani boy whose best friend, Hassan (Ahmed Khan Mahmidzada), also happens to be his servant. He and Hassan fly kites, apparently a competitive and popular pastime among the youth of Kabul. Hassan has the reputation as Kabul’s best kite runner, the half of a kite flying duo who runs after a kite when it is cut loose from its string. But something traumatic (read: dramatic) happens to Hassan as Amir looks on. The boys never mention it to each other, but it changes their relationship forever.

 Soon, the Soviets invade and Amir and his father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi) must flee the country. Baba is a moderate, complaining both about the student Communists in Kabul and the religious mullahs in Amir's school. He knows he and Amir will not fare well while the Soviets occupy Afghanistan, and he and his son emigrate to America. Here the narrative departs from the relationship between Hassan and Amir and follows Amir as he finishes growing up in America (now played by Khalid Abdalla), until a shocking phone call brings him back to Afghanistan.

 The first two-thirds of the film, while stronger than the last section, still has its weak moments. The trite drama of Hassan's traumatic experience (I'm avoiding giving a spoiler here, in case you can't tell), witnessed by Amir, coming immediately after they win the Kabul kite flying contest, for instance. Or the way the film prefers to tell rather than show us what it is trying to say. Racism, stoicism, and evil are all evoked in the simplest of methods, with little room for ambiguity or accompanying thought. The film does have its moments; the kite-flying scenes over the city and mountains of Kabul are pretty and entertaining, and it has a cast of competent actors. But on Amir's return to Asia, the inoffensively bland tone of the film is reversed for one of nonsensical melodrama.

There are a number of illogical and impossible coincidences toward the end of the film meant to heighten the dramatic stakes for Amir‘s trip back to Afghanistan, including a Dickensian coincidence so unlikely that it approaches the amusing while the film is attempting to be shocking. Dickensian coincidences are thusly called because, to the best of my knowledge, Charles Dickens was the only writer who could make such an obvious fictional device work. Dickens was, first of all, an excellent writer who used the incredible coincidences in his fiction to express personal beliefs and thematic concerns rather than score cheap dramatic points; secondly, he was writing in a time before coincidences on such a scale became the stuff of daytime television and lazy writers.

The Kite Runner is a lazy drama. Of course characters left long ago by the narrative -- in 1978, to be exact -- return “unexpectedly” to play an important role in Amir’s return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan: this is the easiest way to resolve the narrative. It seems not to occur to the filmmakers that there are some things that cannot be resolved, or that it is highly unlikely that (BEWARE SPOILERS) the bully from Amir’s old neighborhood who raped Hassan is now the Taliban official who is raping Hassan’s son (SPOILER END). In context, despite the subject matter, this development is almost laughable, and it is just part of the lazy writing exhibited in the last third of The Kite Runner. I’ll avoid any more spoilers, but let me just say that it seems that author Khaled Housseini, who wrote the book on which the film is based, seemed to have written it with the aid of a dictionary of fiction cliches.

I am usually a sucker for foreign-language films about children. For some reason, other countries just seem to do it better than we do. But the material here has been covered before with more grace and art than The Kite Runner is able to accomplish. For the loss of childhood innocence, there is I’m Not Scared (Io non ho paura, 2003) or, better yet The Spirit of the Beehive (El espiritu de la clomena, 1973), which also deals with the intersection of national and familial politics. For the position of children in the class struggle, there is Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) or its heir apparent from Iran, Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman, 1997). The struggles of immigrant families, especially Muslim families, as they try to adjust to a new country while maintaining their own national, cultural, and religious identity was much better addressed in My Son the Fanatic (1997). The point is, what good The Kite Runner has, has been done before, and all its weaknesses make it not worth watching at all. Instead check out that list of films I just hurled at you.