Guy Ritchie's The Covenant
Ritchie is still happy to fall back into his comfort zone — see 2019's The Gentleman or Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre from earlier this year — but The Covenant represents another attempt at something slightly different for the veteran director now 14 movies into his career.
The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as U.S. Army special operations sergeant John Kinley, who leads a small team tasked with sniffing out and recovering explosives and weapons used by the Taliban during the War in Afghanistan. Kinley recruits a local Afghan translator named Ahmed (Dar Salim), who blames the Taliban for killing his son. The team investigates a weapons factory when they are suddenly ambushed, leaving only an injured Kinley and Ahmed alive, trapped deep in mountainous enemy territory.
The story certainly covers very familiar ground and there aren't a ton of narrative surprises, but there is still plenty of drama and propulsion, mostly thanks to Ritchie's expert direction of action sequences. Ritchie again goes against his usual fast-chopping style in favor of a more ponderous, wider-angle approach, really allowing the viewer to easily follow what's going on and where all of the characters are on the board. There are some particularly impressive sequences in and around mountains and valleys (filmed in Alicante, Spain) where Kinley and Ahmed progress slowly and carefully along a path to escape like they are characters in a video game. Cinematographer Ed Wild deserves a lot of credit as well for setting up several well-considered and effective sequences.
Gyllenhaal plays the gruff and commanding sergeant effectively, but really gets to crank up the volume in the movie's second half, where he is tormented after returning home to America with the knowledge that Ahmed is still on the run in Afghanistan. There is some slightly heavy-handed commentary here about America's empty promises and indifferent treatment towards the people risking and losing their lives out of sight and mind, but it doesn't linger on it for too long before things are exploding again. Gyllenhaal froths with rage and intensity like few others can, doing his best to wring out pathos from familiar story beats. Dar Salim fares even better here as a quieter, wearier man who goes about doing what needs to be done calmly and expertly.
The movie ends somewhat anticlimactically with an absurd flex of military machinery and firepower ultimately saving the day (courtesy of Antony Starr from "The Boys"), but it's still a satisfying experience due to the final fate of our two leads. The end credits list statistics about the number of local translators still hiding from the Taliban after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, which feels less like a political statement and more like a truth worth telling, even if it's one dressed up with action movie trappings.
Some might by frustrated by Ritchie's more straightforward approach, both narratively and cinematically, but it's ultimately a finely crafted and well-performed piece of action. It will be interesting to see if Ritchie goes back to a more serious well again. His next feature, titled "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare," would seem to suggest a return to his witty toff-guy comfort zone, but maybe we're in an every-other-movie-and-we'll-try-something phase. Either way, I'm happy to keep watching.
