There’s a certain voyeuristic appeal to fiction like The Kite Runner. It’s safe to say the topic of “Afghanistan” is a touchy and fascinating one, and to be honest, before 9/11, no one on this side of the Atlantic felt much need to know anything about it since the Russians withdrew in the ‘80s.  The Kite Runner brings us an insider’s point of view on what the country was, before the Communists arrived and after the Taliban took over. We learn something new about a culture we have until recently ignored, with tragic consequences. For Afghanis, The Kite Runner – both book and film – may be their big chance to show a bit of what their culture means to the Western mainstream.

But there’s something troubling about The Kite Runner all the same. The film (I have not read the book) is startlingly conventional, obedient to the kind of Hollywood storytelling symmetry you don’t see much in “serious” films these days. Many of the developments are not so much telegraphed as advertised in advance; lines of dialogue spoken early on are spoken again later, now meant to carry new meaning. Old menaces return to threaten new surrogate characters in the same way. Every dangling thread is tied off with such a heavy eye toward the poetic that the mechanics of the story merely come off contrived.

The story of Amir as an adult frames the story of Amir as a child. Amir the child (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is son to a wealthy man in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the late ‘70s. (Like so many things in this film, what Amir’s father does for a living is left unexplained.) Amir’s best friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) is his servant, and the son of Amir’s father’s servant. Their friendship is real, but the master-servant bedrock of their relationship leaves Amir uneasy. Hassan’s selfless devotion, so strong it borders on the angelic, doesn’t ease Amir’s discomfort.

When Hassan is sexually assaulted by a trio of older boys and Amir is too afraid to stop them, their relationship is poisoned. Hassan thinks no one knows what has happened to him, but Amir can no longer look at him; Hassan’s face is enough to remind him of his cowardice. He seeks to have Hassan banished from the house, unsuccessfully; eventually Hassan and his father leave of their own free will. Years later, when the Russians invade, so do Amir and his father.

They come to San Francisco. Amir meets and eventually marries Soraya (Atossa Leoni). Amir has just received his first published book when he receives a phone call from an old family friend, urging him to come visit in Pakistan. When he does, he finds out Hassan’s fate: He married, bore a son, and was later killed alongside his wife by the Taliban. Will it surprise you to find out Hassan’s son Sohrab is the same age as Amir and Hassan were at the time of the fateful assault? How about that Amir sees rescuing Sohrab as a way to redeem his childhood cowardice? If so, you should see more movies.

The Kite Runner contains no surprises, in story, in character development, in dialogue or in ambition. The self-aware portentousness of the early dialogue – spoken by young boys talking to each other, no less – is a good indicator of how seriously the film wants to be taken, but served more as a warning to me. I’ll grant that the filmmakers – director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction) and writer David Benioff (25th Hour) – are not the most subtle storytellers in the business. But they are better storytellers than this, not so prone to misplaced visual cues (what is with that massive, badly green-screened picture window in adult Amir’s living room?), clumsy expository dialogue (“let’s get out of here!,” shouted by a boy to his companions while they’ve been running away for a length of time), and vagaries left unexplained. Having not read the book, I can only guess how closely they adhere to its story. Perhaps its massive success scared them away from putting their own stamp on the material.

The Kite Runner, and works like it, leave me uneasy. It gives someone like me a window into a culture and national identity I know little about, and there is value in that. The cost for this mainstream exposure and acceptance, however, seems to be blasting away all the unique features of that culture’s storytelling tradition until we have something as familiar and well-worn as a Frank Capra picture. This could well be the face of cultural assimilation. If so, I don’t like it.