111 minutes, opens May 12

Directors: Glenn Ficarra and John Requa|

Stars: Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Martin Freeman, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfred Molina, Josh Charles

★★★

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Tina Fey goes to war, taking her funny bone with her. Cast as an American journalist, she has a dull job with a cable news network when she's offered a posting in Kabul, reporting on the war in Afghanistan.

Adapted from Kim Barker's memoir, Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the film has had one critic comparing it to Eat, Pray, Love, but Barker has come to its defence, citing its success in catching the absurdity that colours the hazardousness of life in a war zone. M.A.S.H and Catch 22 are the models but the result – despite Barker's endorsement – is more like being on the front line with Saturday Night Live. There's plenty of mayhem but not nearly enough gallows humour and no trace of anarchy.

Once in Kabul, or "the Kabubble" as she learns to think of it, Kim fetches up at the Fun House, a correspondents' hotel-cum-frathouse where every night is a party and the residents relate to one another with a functional mix of rivalry and camaraderie, liberally flavoured with lust. Kim is instantly assigned her place in the sexual pecking order when she's informed that she'd be a six at home but here she's a 10.

This backhander loses a little of its lustre, however, when Martin Freeman's Iain, a cocky Scottish photographer tells her that she's managed to make friends with the only two women in the place who can make her look like an ugly duckling. One is Shakira (Shelia Van), a Lebanese journalist. The other is Tanya (Margot Robbie), a swashbuckling Australian blonde television reporter with a flair for getting her stories on air – a talent which will grow even more important as the networks begin to lose interest in a war that has gone on too long. These two become her allies, mentors and confidantes while Iain is soon setting himself up as her potential love interest. His jibes are turning into mating calls and the script is doing its best to turn Kim and him into a combat zone version of Beatrice and Benedick.

The story settles into a jumpy, episodic rhythm as she begins to move on from being the bumbling new girl whose hijab keeps slipping off her head to becoming a seasoned reporter adept at getting herself included in army missions. It takes her some time, however, to realise that her gung ho desire to be in the thick of things has a way of landing other people in trouble.

Christopher Abbott makes sympathetic work of his role as her fixer, who resigns at one point because he can't afford to indulge her foolhardiness, and a silky and unflappable Billy Bob Thornton shines as a colonel who baits new correspondents for sport. Kim is also nurturing her fondness for Josh Charles as the boyfriend she left behind in Chicago. But Skype puts an end to that by inadvertently demonstrating the perils of trying to maintain a long-haul affair with someone you were only ever half in love with. And her romantic life is already complicated. Along with Iain and her admiring Australian bodyguard (a muscular Stephen Peacocke), there's Alfred Molina, cast as an Afghan politician with an impolitic crush on her.

All this does make it sound as if those Eat, Pray, Love comparisons are justified but the film is better than that. It does canvass the occupational risk of becoming addicted to the adrenaline rush which is inseparable from war reporting. And Kim eventually has to face the unpalatable truth that editors inevitably become bored with stories which don't leapfrog into a place on the front page or a spot at the head of the bulletin every week. And in the end, she makes the even more doleful discovery that rivalry does trump camaraderie after all.

But these questions – central to the life of a correspondent – are just skimmed over lightly as she bounces from one adventure and misadventure to the next, eventually landing in the uncommitted middle. The film is neither serious enough nor seriously funny. The farce needs to be blacker.