With good reason, filmmakers who adapt books for the screen can be protective of their freedom to depart from their source material. So anyone familiar with Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini's runaway international best-seller might be shocked to discover that director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Benioff have played things unnervingly safe, barely changing a word of Hosseini's story. The results may not feel staggeringly original, but it's hard not to be moved by Hosseini's epic, devastating tale of ruined friendships and a destroyed country.
Like Hosseini's original, the story begins in California, in 2001, as budding novelist Amir (Khalid Abdalla) gets a call from Pakistan telling him he has to come visit an ailing family friend. The story flashes back to Kabul, Afghanistan, in the '70s, where Amir, the son of a prosperous and wealthy family, spends his carefree days playing with his best friend and servant Hassan, an ethnic Hazara whose loyalty knows no bounds. Despite the boys' obvious affection for one another, their friendship is complicated both by their master-servant status and by their ethnic differences, both of which are exploited by the local bullies, led by an older kid named Assef. The soft, sensitive Amir is further tormented by the fact that he seems unable to live up the expectations of his domineering father (Homayoun Ershadi, whom some may remember from Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Taste of Cherry), whose concerns are borne out by a later, stunning act of cowardice on the boy's part. All that is just act one. Soon, Amir's personal hell is consumed by a larger one, as the Soviets invade and the boy and his father have to flee the country and settle in America. Eventually, we can predict, Amir's need for redemption will send him back to Afghanistan, now under Taliban rule.
The film's main departures and omissions come in its final act, where Hollywood regulations require that the pace must accelerate, and anything resembling reflection or languor is verboten. These scenes also feel like the film's weakest spot, not because it stops being ridiculously faithful to the book but because, in trying to make the story more cinematic, Forster and Benioff take some of the more melodramatic elements of the novel and send them over the top. More importantly, the final act is also when Alberto Iglesias's seriously misguided score, merely intrusive throughout the rest of the film, suddenly becomes actively grating. (Shockingly, Iglesias's music was nominated for a Golden Globe this week, so some people evidently disagreed.) Luckily, the wounds are not fatal. The Kite Runner the film may have to always live in the shadow of its potent source material — but that's not such a bad place to be.
— Bilge Ebiri