I read Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner last year, and was less impressed with it than most people seemed to be. I felt that too many circumstances in the book came off as wholly contrived and highly coincidental, to the point that while reading it, I could practically see Hosseini in the background pulling all the strings. This is certainly not the kind of effect that writers strive to create, so in that sense Hosseini’s novel failed for me.

Despite this experience with the book, I decided that the movie might still be worth seeing, so I recently decided to rent it. Unfortunately, the film suffers from the same problems as the original work, and the compressed format made the flaws of the narrative structure even more glaring.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The film opens with an adult Amir (played by Khalid Abdalla) receiving a package in the mail. The box contains copies of a novel he has recently published, his first. He quietly shares in the triumph with wife Soraya (Atossa Leoni), but the celebration doesn’t last long. Amir soon receives a phone call from an old family friend, Rahim Khan (Shaun Toub), who asks him to come back home to Afghanistan to take care of some old business. “There’s a way to be good again,” he says cryptically.

This sets Amir off on a trip down memory lane, which the audience sees in the form of a flashback. The scene shifts to Kabul in the mid-1970s, where a young Amir lives a life of wealth and comfort with his father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi). Amir even has his own servant, a slightly younger boy named Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), and the two appear to be the best of friends. Amir writes stories that he later reads to Hassan (who himself is illiterate), the two play together around the house, and they both love to fly kites, which was a major pastime back then. They’re inseparable, even though it’s revealed that Hassan is Hazara, which apparently means he’s of a lower class.

The friendship comes to a crashing halt when Hassan is brutally beaten and raped by a couple of older bullies that had been bothering Amir earlier. Amir couldn’t stand up to the bullies before, instead relying on the smaller, younger Hassan to bail them out of trouble. Now the bullies found Hassan while he was alone, and take their revenge. Amir witnesses the terrible act, but again is paralyzed by fear and runs away instead of trying to do something to help his friend. This leaves him wracked with guilt. He is unable to look at Hassan without remembering the incident, so he quits hanging out with the boy and also frames him for stealing a watch, which results in Hassan and his father leaving the house.

Shortly thereafter, Amir and Baba are forced to flee the country as the Russians invade. They eventually wind up in America, where Baba takes on a menial job in order to put Amir through college. Amir graduates, gets married, and writes a book, but through it all, he’s still haunted by what happened with Hassan. So when Rahim Khan says that there’s a chance to be good again, Amir can’t refuse.

Amir learns that Hassan also got married and had a son. Hassan never forgot his childhood friend Amir, leaving a letter for him that Rahim Khan hands over. Rahim Khan also says that Hassan and his wife were assassinated in the street by the vicious Taliban, leaving the boy as an orphan. Rahim Khan says that Amir can make things right by rescuing the boy and giving him a good life in America — which Amir does.

My Reaction: As I said, I felt the narrative structure of this film was highly flawed. The best parts were the flashbacks to Amir and Hassan’s childhood, but those didn’t last long. The whole second act that showed Amir and Baba fleeing Afghanistan and relocating to America was boring and difficult to get through because the adult characters and their struggles weren’t nearly as interesting. I realize that some sense of how Amir adjusted to life in America had to be conveyed, but it could have been done in far fewer scenes.

After that, the coincidences and contrivances pretty much killed the film. Assef, the same bully that victimized Hassan is now a powerful Taliban leader and has control of Hassan’s son? Yeah, right. The boy, who didn’t know Amir from Adam, would risk his own well-being to shoot Assef in the eye? Yeah, right. Amir was able to escape from a guarded compound with the boy with ease? Yeah, right. After willingly escaping with Amir, Sohrab suddenly turns completely silent and refuses to say a word, smile, or otherwise acknowledge Amir or his wife in any way? Yeah, — well, you get the picture.

Overall, The Kite Runner suffers from a series of problems that get in the way of what otherwise might be a decent story of redemption. The idea is ok, but the execution, both here and in the book, is not very good. I give this film 3 stars out of 5.