Movies for Men: ‘The Covenant’

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If you have worn out your John Wick DVDs and are weary of scouring Netflix or the local movie theater in vain for an action flick that doesn’t feature Marvel superheroes or a petite supermodel laying waste to a small army of trained thugs over twice her size, check out an overlooked movie from last year called The Covenant – out on DVD, Amazon Prime, and elsewhere. It is a rousing action flick with unexpected emotional depth and stirring themes of honor, duty, and service.

The Covenant is a Guy Ritchie-directed, 2023 military action drama set in Afghanistan circa 2017. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as U.S. Army Green Beret master sergeant John Kinley, and Baghdad-born Danish actor Dar Salim as Ahmed, his Afghan interpreter. Working together to locate and shut down Taliban IED factories, Kinley has difficulty reining in the savvy but problematic Ahmed, who Kinley discovers has a personal vendetta against the Taliban that makes him a loose cannon in the field.

Kinley and Ahmed don’t hit it off as friends, but they do grow to respect each other – especially after Ahmed proves himself to be loyal and indispensable. They also mirror each other as family men: both are faithfully married – Kinley with two young children and Ahmed with a noticeably pregnant wife. Kinley just wants to survive his tour of duty and get back to his family business in America; Ahmed is counting on U.S. promises to reward the local interpreters like himself with an immigration visa to the States.

SOME SPOILERS

On one of their missions to uncover a bomb factory, Kinley and his unit come under heavy assault from a horde of Taliban. Kinley’s squad is wiped out; he and Ahmed run, shoot, and knife their way to temporary safety but are pursued for days until eventually Kinley is wounded and captured. But Ahmed rescues his delirious, half-dead sergeant and undertakes a punishing trek across the Afghan mountains, alternating between tending to the wounded Kinley and dragging or pushing him in a rugged cart over the craggy, sun-blasted landscape.

Days later, narrowly evading Taliban search parties along the way, an exhausted Ahmed ultimately manages to get his sergeant into the hands of American soldiers, and Kinley is flown home to the States to convalesce. He remembers nothing since being wounded, but knows that Ahmed made a Herculean effort to save Kinley’s life at risk of his own. When he learns that Ahmed has had to take his wife into hiding because word of his heroism has made him a wanted man by the Taliban, Kinley follows up with U.S. Immigration to expedite Ahmed’s promised visa, only to get caught up in a glacially paced, maddening maze of bureaucratic indifference and red tape.

As he slowly recovers his memory of Ahmed’s epic rescue effort, Kinley becomes obsessed with repaying the debt he owed the interpreter by helping get him out of Afghanistan. Eventually he realizes the only way Ahmed and his wife will survive is if he risks his own life to personally track them down and get them out. Kinley then undertakes his own Herculean rescue effort. He calls in favors and hires a well-connected, if somewhat mercenary, military contractor to get re-inserted into the war zone, get to Ahmed before the Taliban do, and get back out before the Taliban get them both.

END OF SPOILERS

Well-received by both critics and audiences (Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 83% on the critic “Tomatometer” and a whopping audience score of 98%), The Covenant has nevertheless not achieved the widespread popularity it deserves, having earned only $21 million to date against a $55 million budget. Reportedly, its “whiplash-inducing change of tone” from Ritchie’s usual, darkly comic fare alienated his fan base. Box office figures aside, however, The Covenant has become one of my all-time favorite movies.

Emotionally powerful moments abound in this outstanding film, thanks in no small part to the strong acting of the leads and supporting actors (Dar Salim in particular turned in an understated, Oscar-worthy performance). But there is no hint of sentimental or mawkish cringe; pretty much everyone in the film is a warrior or married to one, and (apart from a frustrated eruption in which Kinley loses it over the phone after being put on hold for the zillionth time) both male and female characters face every challenge and danger by carrying themselves with Stoic restraint, quiet strength, and forthright sincerity.

Nor is there a hint of woke or politically correct messaging. Unlike many, if not most, Hollywood flicks about America’s war on terror after 9/11, The Covenant does not present an America-hating moral equivalence with the bad guys. The American soldiers are depicted as decent, upstanding, regular guys doing a thankless job their government has tasked them with; the Taliban are depicted as ruthless torturers and killers who think nothing of executing locals that refuse to provide aid or information.

Nor, for what it’s worth, is there a hint of Guy Ritchie’s unfortunate penchant for distractingly stylish cinematic touches that wreck the willing suspension of disbelief. As any great director should, he gets out of the way of the well-drawn characters and lets them tell the story. And Ritchie is one of the few directors who is unafraid to stock his films with protagonists who are men’s men: Jason Statham, e.g., in Wrath of Man, or Charlie Hunnam in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, or the ensemble casts of The Gentlemen and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The flick is loaded with tense action scenes, including a literally explosive, hail-of-gunfire climax, but the most compelling reason to watch The Covenant is the inspirational depiction of warriors and family men of integrity, bound together by a sense of duty to selflessly honor the debts that only war can impose.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior