Review: 'Whiskey Tango Foxtrot' looks inside war reporting
Days after the journalism procedural "Spotlight" won best picture at the Academy Awards, Paramount is releasing "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot," a comic drama about war reporting with Tina Fey as a rookie correspondent finding her way.
Fey plays Kim Baker, a 40-something New York TV producer summoned to a meeting of "unmarried, childless personnel" to consider a three-month assignment embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Three months becomes three years, 2004 to 2006, as Baker evolves from clueless newbie to savvy reporter, navigating the country's repressive cultural norms and the off-the-clock lifestyle of drunken debauchery shared by her expatriate colleagues.
[...] the film offers a fresh look at the adrenaline-laced lifestyle of war correspondents and a timely criticism of TV news.
Ultimately, Baker faces two challenges in the film: the farfetched one of rescuing her boyfriend from Taliban kidnappers, and the more realistic one of not finding an audience for news from what one soldier she interviews describes as a "forgotten war, capital F, capital W."
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot," a Paramount Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "pervasive language, some sexual content, drug use and violent war images.