Tina Fey’s in Way Over Her Head in the ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ Trailer

This weekend, Tina Fey shares a starring credit with Amy Poehler in the raunchapalooza Sisters, and so the folks at Paramount have seized on this opportunity to unveil the first trailer for a decidedly different Tina Fey project, the war comedy Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. An adaptation of reporter Kim Barker’s memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the film goes to the natural hotbed of hilarity that is the politically contested regions of the Middle East to mine for a commodity more precious than oil: laughs!

Barker provided embedded coverage of Afghanistan’s continuing turmoil in 2004, at which point much of the public attention had shifted to Iraq. Barker, undaunted, managed to ingratiate herself with the Taliban and get astonishing inside scoops while, judging from the trailer embedded above, getting into quite a bit of mischief as well. The image of Tina Fey yelling and pumping a machine gun is, to say the least, powerful. While in the field, Barker falls in with a fellow correspondent played by Martin Freeman and apparently learns a valuable lesson about living life with purpose, or something.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (military code for W-T-F) rejoins the dynamic duo of Fey and her 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock, who wrote the script for this new picture with Focus’ Glenn Ficarra and John Requa set to direct. From the looks of it, WTF will not retain the nearly cartoonish lunacy that characterized 30 Rock, but hopefully the blackly comic jokes will still pack the same punch. The mismatch dynamic between Fey and Margot Robbie as another embedded reporter who befriends Barker could cover some interesting territory, but the film’s March 4 release raises a few suspicions. Studios hide flops-to-be in the early spring, when most people are sleeping off their winter depression. Sisters was a deliriously funny success; only time will tell if Fey’s got another one in her.

The official poster is below: