Lord knows, Guy Ritchie doesn’t make it easy. That the British director’s new film is stuck with the name Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant smacks of just the sort of self-promoting swagger that makes his action capers so tough to warm to. (The back-story is not much help: the belated discovery of a previous Covenant, an iffy 2006 horror, leading not to a title change but a splash of personal branding.) All the more surprising, then, that this stock but sturdy war movie proves to be Ritchie’s best work since the Sherlock Holmes films he made a decade ago with Robert Downey Jr. That may be a low bar. With Ritchie, even small mercies are welcome.
The film is set in the last phase of the US occupation of Afghanistan. The setting is freighted enough to draw a wince at the thought of Ritchie descending in his costume department fatigues. And the first act unfolds in signature style, with lairy banter and flash-harry camerawork. What do the Green Berets, led by Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), do here in Helmand? “We get into trouble,” Gyllenhaal twinkles. The most egregious Ritchie-ism comes with the mention of Taliban IEDs. In a loud font, the screen fills with the words Improvised Explosive Device, as if the director believed he was advertising them.
Yet things look up once Sergeant Kinley is knocked unconscious. By then, his unit has been joined by local interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim), a taciturn figure who will become the difference between life and death for his employers. The story changes shape, morphing into a sun-blasted survival tale. The tone shifts too: flintier now, bluster-free, action scenes impressively stripped back.
The script even gets a handle on the long-term price of collaboration. Though the movie is fictional, the uncertain fate of thousands of real Afghan interpreters after the hurried 2021 US withdrawal gives it genuine heft. Solid is still all The Covenant is, but Ritchie has at last got out of the way long enough to make a film worth putting his name to.
★★★☆☆
On Amazon Prime Video in the UK now
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