Throughout his career, Gerard Butler has consistently demonstrated his toughness, unflappability, and often indestructible nature in movie after movie. If he is not saving the president in the chaos of Olympus Has Fallen, he is landing a crashing aircraft and fighting bandits in Plane. But in the 2023 spy film Kandahar, now streaming on Tubi and Pluto, Butler takes up a role that asks him to drop the invincible armor. He plays a character who knows his limits and second-guesses his choices, resulting in one of the more restrained and interesting turns of his career. Unlike Butler’s other movies, Kandahar is a survival thriller in which we watch him wrestle with his humanity rather than predominantly with external forces.
What Is ‘Kandahar’ About?
After collaborating with Butler on two outings—in the fantasy film Angel Has Fallen and the disaster drama Greenland—director Ric Roman Waugh trusts his leading man once more in Kandahar. Butler plays Tom Harris, an undercover CIA operative who blows his cover when a mission in Afghanistan goes sideways. After the exposure, Tom and his translator, Mo (Navid Negahban), must find a way to their extraction point organized by his CIA boss (Roman Chalmers) in Kandahar, located 400 miles away, while being hunted by elite militias. Yes, his daunting mission requires some heroics, but the unforgiving terrain and the odds stacked against him make his journey a survival endeavor.
Like many action thrillers, the film has shootouts, drone strikes, and chase sequences, but its real hook is less about its spectacle and more about Harris himself. We explore his exhaustion, his frayed nerves, and the emotional weight of his mission’s collateral damage. Recognizing his new role’s demands, Butler dials down his usual swagger, showing us a man who hesitates, calculates, and often looks like he might not make it.
‘Kandahar’ Offers Us a Gerard Butler We Have Hardly Seen
Gerard Butler in KandaharImage via Open Road Films
As the guy Hollywood often relies on for unshakable masculinity, Butler’s turn in Kandahar is eye-opening in relation to his acting range. Like his other heroic flicks, Kandahar gives us a Butler who is skilled in combat but whose circumstances force him to evaluate everything before making a move. Tom Harris speaks through his body language—slumped shoulders, hesitant eyes, and pauses where other action heroes would roar. It is not an outright radical shift, but it’s a notable one. Instead of the unbreakable warrior we’ve seen in the past, we watch a man who is vulnerable and could at any moment fail.
Director Ric Roman Waugh’s eye for tension ensures that the film’s spectacle doesn’t override its human stakes. While the movie might at times, like its protagonist, seem lost in the desert, this quiet human feeling injects it with a pulse. Waugh frames Tom against sweeping desert landscapes that dwarf him, depicting just how much of a speck he is in the hostile environment. Waugh’s action scenes are quick and tense, with the bulk of the film lingering on the power of silence and isolation. Added to the film’s positives is Mitchell LaFortune’s script, which provides insights into the complexities of spy operations, giving perspective to murky rival intelligence schemes and civilians caught in the middle. His firsthand experience as a former intelligence officer who lived through the messiness of such operations adds to the film’s authenticity.
Why ‘Kandahar’ Is Relevant in Today’s Espionage Landscape
Kandahar may have its shortcomings, but it stands out for how close it gets to real-world headlines. Typical action thrillers might emphasize good-versus-evil binaries of geopolitics, but Kandahar refuses that temptation by acknowledging the complicated realities of modern conflict. There’s no romanticizing of CIA missions and nor is Tom depicted as a flawless patriot. For Waugh, who is right or wrong doesn’t matter. What is important is showing the perilous effect that espionage has on operatives and civilians. He uses the desert setting as a survival backdrop that embodies the complexity and hostility of a region that has been shaped by decades of foreign interventions, with confusing, shifting alliances that result in cyclical violence.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo 🍸James Bond 🏺Indiana Jones 🔧John McClane 🎭Ethan Hunt
01 You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02 You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03 You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04 The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05 How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06 Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07 Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08 What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09 Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10 It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Tom’s translator, Mo, grounds the narrative in a way that Butler’s character alone could not. This relationship adds to how the film strips down Butler to make him dependent. But Mo also sheds light on the ordinary people caught in the crossfire of intelligence wars—those whose homes, families, and futures are disrupted by conflicts out of their control. Waugh uses his dynamic with Harris to emphasize themes of trust and betrayal as lethal weapons of survival.
Kandahar may feature Gerard Butler in familiar terrain—guns, grit, and survival—but it distinguishes itself by peeling back the invincible-hero image and grounding the action in lived human stakes. Despite critics being divided about the film, Butler’s restrained performance, Waugh’s careful direction, and LaFortune’s authentic script have been convincing for fans, as the film has performed well across streaming platforms. The film’s introduction to Netflix will likely continue that trend, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on its exhilarating desert journey.
