Guy Richie's The Covenant - Review Thread

I’m not sure how or why Guy Richie has managed to pump out no fewer than four different movies post-pandemic including two movies that came out within a month of each other in the spring of 2023, but one way or another he seems to have pulled it off for better or worse. Of those four his Afghanistan War thriller The Covenant, which was released with the director’s name in front of it for trademark purposes, is plainly the best and most ambitious. Of course Guy Richie being something of a hack this isn’t really the high compliment it might sound like. The film focuses on a friendship between a soldier on a special task force (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the Afghan translator assigned to his unit and how they bond after the translator rescues him during a mission that goes south and how the Gyllenhaal character tries to pay him back after the translator runs into problems trying to get a visa to escape the country. So, it’s basically Dersu Uzala meets Rambo 2 but in Afghanistan. The whole screenplay isn’t really a model of creativity; if I wanted to make a movie about the plight of local translators in Afghanistan I’d probably come up with a story more or less identical to this and while the movie ostensibly wants to bring attention to a serious issue it does it in a pretty shallow and cowardly way. It goes way out of its way to avoid making the U.S. military itself look in any way bad in all of this and while it shows that there are roadblocks to these people getting the visas they’re owed it sure isn’t interested in going into the specifics of why this has become an issue (hint: it starts with “islamo” and ends in “phobia”). Richie clearly seems to take what he’s doing here very seriously and to his credit the film has reasonably strong production values and has some very well staged action scenes but I’m not sure the substance or insight is really there to sustain the rather solemn tone it’s reaching for. All told I do think something like this could certainly be done a lot worse than it is here but the film ultimately pulls most of its strongest punches and will likely be only a minor entry when the book is finally written on “war on terror” era war movies.