The Checklist is my way of catching up with films I missed earlier in the year that I really wanted to see and/or have arisen as recommendations by folks whose opinions I trust. I already have a pile of them to get through on this year’s list, so let’s get started!
Guy Ritchie has had an interesting career thus far. When things kicked off for him in the late ’90s with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he was labeled as a Tarantino knock-off. While he has played in that sandbox on occasion since – namely with RocknRolla and The Gentlemen – overall he moved away from that pretty quickly. I haven’t seen his 2002 remake of Swept Away, so I cannot speak to that particular film, but his 2005 Kabbalistic crime thriller Revolver was a pretty off-kilter sidestep for him.
Then came his blockbuster era, ushered in by a pair of successful Sherlock Holmes actioners, continuing with his underseen (but fantastic) take on The Man from UNCLE, tripping up at the box office again with the offbeat videogame-y King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and finding its footing again (at least financially) in a big way with his 2019 remake of Disney’s Aladdin. That last one raked in over $1 billion at the worldwide box office. With that kind of success, Ritchie can write his own ticket on what he wants to do for at least decade. This is where it gets fun though.
Normally you would expect someone in a similar position to just keep making huge movies. To be fair, Guy *is* currently attached to another pair of Disney fantasy epics: Aladdin 2 and Hercules. Will they actually get made? Who knows! Guy hasn’t been resting on his laurels waiting for them to happen, however. Like I said, this is where it gets fun.
So what has ol’ Mr. Ritchie been doing? Cranking out annual midbudget genre fare, that’s what. 2019’s The Gentlemen came first. Sure, it was technically shot before Aladdin, but it falling after it has made it a prelude to what is now officially my favorite Guy Ritchie era: the one where he cashes in his clout to make some great smaller movies. Wrath of Man – his best film to date – came next, dishing out a deliciously nihilistic crime revenger starring his longtime pal/cohort Jason Statham. The Stathinator returned in Ritchie’s immediate next, the spy satire Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, which was handed to us earlier this year. That one was unfortunately a bit of a stumble, but we all stumble sometimes. The question was then “Can Guy Ritchie rebound again?”
The answer is a big fat “YES!”
The Covenant centers around an army sergeant, John Kinley (the ever-great Jake Gyllenhaal), whose unit is assigned a new interpreter, Ahmed Abdullah Yousfi (Dar Salim – the film’s MVP). The team’s job is to tracking down enemy bomb-making facilities in Afghanistan circa 2018. When a mission ends up going south, Ahmed must literally drag an injured John over 65 miles to safety over rough terrain that is teeming with hostiles. He succeeds, but at great cost.
This all happens in the first half of the film. If you’re crying spoilers already, can it. For starters, all of this is laid out in the marketing. As is the fact that the back half of the movie is about John trying to find a way to get Ahmed and his family out of Afghanistan. You see, we – as in the royal American we – promised these interpreters that they and their families could have U.S. citizenship in exchange for aiding our efforts in the Global War on Terror. If you’ve paid attention to the news any during the past decade, you know that we did not make good on that promise. In fact, we abandoned most of them to torture and death at the hands of the Taliban.
That sounds bleak as hell because it is. And that, my friends, is what The Covenant is getting at. This is not a “rah rah AMERICAN MIGHT AND MILITARY SUPERIORITY” film. Instead, this trucks in the dark side of the GWOT, albeit from a personal angle. This film interrogates the micro of this problem – John attempting to save the man who saved him – as opposed to the macro of it. If there’s any major defect of the film, it’s that it doesn’t really dwell on the negative effects we had on these people’s lives and culture, outside of Ahmed and his family. That’s fine. A two-hour dramatic action thriller cannot be all things. The macro nature of it is something for someone else to cover.
There will always be at least some jingoism inherent in a film like this, but overall, Guy Ritchie does not paint a pretty picture of how the U.S. government and military went about things. Instead, he paints an image of a cold & uncaring bureaucracy that is unwilling to repay debts owed. The system has failed Ahmed at every turn, leaving John to seek alternative routes to repay that debt.
Does the film culminate in a huge action sequence where John attempts to extract Ahmed and his family from the country? Yes. Is that a power fantasy? Also yes. But only in the sense that it’s us watching one man going out of his way to do what we should have done for every single interpreter that we lied to. It is a power fantasy, but one with an undercurrent of guilt, shame, and anger. One where you can never fully feel good about it, because you know the actual horrid truth of the matter. It serves as an artistic reminder of our grave mistakes. Ones that should never be forgotten.
Guy Ritchie has crafted another crown jewel for his career with this scathing military actioner. He should be proud of the film he was able to make here. It is just as biting a pop-cinema critique of how we treat our troops – both foreign and domestic – as other modern classics like The Rock, 13 Hours, Den of Thieves, Ambulance, and Ritchie’s own Wrath of Man. Ritchie’s craft here is effortless, constantly complimenting his story, his themes, and the performances as this bleak wartime drama plays out from start to finish. It’s a masterful piece of filmmaking and as good as it is, we should be ashamed that it even has to exist in the first place.
The Covenant is an original action thriller. It was directed by Guy Ritchie, from a screenplay by Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies, and Guy Ritchie. The film was produced by Ivan Atkinson, Josh Berger, John Friedberg, Guy Ritchie, Siobhan Boyes, and Max Keene. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim, Emily Beecham, Fariba Sheikhan, Jonny Lee Miller, Alexander Ludwig, Antony Starr, Reza Diako, Ash Goldeh, Babrak Akbari, Paeman Arianfar, Mo Ahmadi, Damon Zolfaghari, Abbas Fasaei, Sean Sagar, Jason Wong, Rhys Yates, Christian Ochoa Lavernia, Bobby Schofield, and James Nelson-Joyce.
The Schlocketeer 