The greatest movie ever made..!

Lack of good storyline.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This is Timur Bekmambetov's first film and to be honest it's kind of hard to judge the movie without viewing the original Russian edit. Roger Corman sliced and diced the film up and distributed this mess. It has some mildly interesting ideas and moody lighting but the film is pretty bad.Boring and confusing are two words that come to mind. Still, it gives you a window into the world of Bekmambetov during the early days of his career. The director really improved with his next outing: the remake of Corman's "The Arena", and following that, the vampire saga: "Night Watch" and "Day Watch." I think we'll be hearing a lot more from this director. He's still pretty much a diamond-in-the-rough I think. In my opinion, this film isn't really representational of his visual talents.

OK, the first 20 minutes or so you think you are watching an uninspired and poorly-acted b-movie about a western journalist becoming entangled in a dangerous war situation. Top that with a heap of cheap and easy atmospheric special effects and you will find yourself preparing for a long and tedious 90 minutes ahead. But be patient, just wait and get absorbed in the grim, strange and spooky world of a forgotten small-scale war episode, where people become mad and pathetic psychopaths. The madness of war in all its dark glory.For a while I was wondering whether I was watching a foreign (i.e. non-American) movie which had been dubbed into English, but I couldn't figure out whether the actors were speaking in a foreign tongue or not. As I understand now, this movie was made by a Russian director (who also directed the great Night Watch) and features almost only Russian actors. The acting looks bad because of cheap and useless American post-production. It's a strange world...

I've watched the first 40 minutes of the dvd version, completely bored i turned it off. What a waste of time! The movie starts with a simple prologue, after that there are a lot of explosions, gunfire, fights and chaos in dark corridors. Besides the "Get the hell out of here" action plot it was the terriby dubbed, completely "un-lip-sync". My opinion: low-budget, chaotic crap, don't waste your time watching/buying this.

What a disappointment. ESCAPE FROM AFGHANISTAN had the potential to be so thrilling and engaging, but since the acting was so flat, it made it unwatchable. The overall filmmaking was mediocre at best. Too bad since it is so topical right now.