The Kite Runner cleaves to an age-old tradition, and I’m not talking about classical Asian folktales. Rather, this tradition entails exotic fiction being anointed by the mass media for middle-class consumption (in this case, by Oprah), the appropriation of its third world iconography by Hollywood hacks (fortunate son Marc Foster), and the thorough schmaltzing of an entire cultural identity—the conversion of a very real legacy of injustice and suffering into a palatable cineplex evening for American middle-agers who don’t like Judd Apatow and don’t understand actual imported movies.

The Memoirs of a Geisha ordeal (another enervating DreamWorks buy-up) comes to mind, but instead of shooting for glamorous sex as filtered through the vibe of a high-end LA massage parlor, Foster’s film envisions Afghan life to have the melodramatic simplicity of a kebab-house raga, or, more pertinently, American TV shorthand and stereotype. To be fair, Khaled Hosseini’s bestseller had sell-me-on-Santa-Monica-Boulevard all over it; every story beat is either old-world nostalgia or contrived cliché. The movie ramps up the curdles, whether limning the cartoonish travails of its 9-year-old protagonists in pre-Soviet-invasion Kabul (Hassan’s a tough low-caste kid, Amir’s his pussified upper-middle-class pal), or the efforts, 22 years later, of the grown-up, Americanized wimp to rectify his guilt by returning home to the realm of the Taliban. To boot, a pivotal rape scene is timidly abbreviated, and the climactic rescue from a just-plain-evil bully-mullah plays like something out of an Indiana Jones ripoff.

Overshot, overscored, overdigitized, and underthought, The Kite Runner pales by comparison to recent films made in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, and Iran by indigenous filmmakers, simply in how unconvincingly and patronizingly it paints the country and the culture. The casting of the Scottish-born, stunningly dull, baby-ass-faced Khalid Abdalla as the grown Amir serves only to backlight the movie’s empty head and mushy heart. The happiest grace note is in the casting, as an amusingly overdressed patriarch, of Homayoun Ershadi, whom too few of us will remember as Abbas Kiarostami’s architect friend and the iconic star of his Taste of Cherry—a real visit, for anyone who’s interested, to a southwest Asia you can believe.

THE KITE RUNNER DIR. MARC FOSTER | RATED PG-13 | OPENS FRI AT SELECT THEATERS

Tags: adaptations, Film, Oprah, the kite runner