Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant Review: Rah-Rah for the Machine of Never-Ending War

With the haughtily titled Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, Ritchie and frequent screenwriting collaborators Marn Davies and Ivan Atkinson have crafted something akin to a western set in Afghanistan. Taking place 17 years into the Afghan war, when the U.S. military was employing around 50,000 native interpreters, the film is at its most kinetic and satisfying across a series of set pieces that escalate tension as its characters navigate the backroads and shifting borders of the turf war between the Taliban and the American military.

At the center of the film is Army sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), who’s leading a team on a mission to dismantle IEDs targeting their forces. Kinley loses his interpreter early on, and hires a replacement in the charming Ahmed (Dar Salim), a well-educated but mysterious mechanic who gets the job partly because he has the gumption to be cheeky with Kinley during the interview. As they travel through the back roads of Afghanistan, Kinley learns that Ahmed has a much larger platoon of skills than mere translation, and that his motivation stems, in part, from a quest for revenge against the Taliban for murdering his son.

After a mission goes awry when Kinley’s men are ambushed by Taliban soldiers, he and Ahmed are thrown into a battle for survival. With no food, water, reliable transport or the ability to contact the military base that’s days away, Ahmed tries to usher a severely injured Kinley back to safety. As Ritchie, Davies, and Atkinson did with Jason Statham’s character in Wrath of Man, information about Ahmed’s talents and motivations are doled out in tantalizing portions, and Salim is very much up to the challenge of saying little while communicating a lot.

The filmmakers see the war in Afghanistan as a war of retribution, waged on a bleak landscape across which people communicate with stacks of cash. In the way it touches on the murkiness of state-sanctioned violence and the infinitude of revenge, the difficulty of doing right when it’s troublesome to do so, The Covenant recalls nothing less than Steven Spielberg’s Munich.

But what follows couldn’t be further from that infinitely more nuanced and engaging film. After Ahmed drags Kinley through the desert mountains of Afghanistan toward safety, The Covenant becomes the story of Kinley desperately fighting the special immigration system on behalf of Ahmed. It’s then that the film begins to bang the drum loudly on behalf of privatized military outfits and American exceptionalism. Kinley can’t get the immigration office to sponsor green cards for Ahmed’s family in any reasonable time frame, and so, superhero-like, a now-discharged Kinley leaves his devoted wife (Emily Beecham) to return to Afghanistan to save Ahmed from the clutches of the Taliban’s regime with the help of a private security firm.

It doesn’t help that the film’s characterizations are thin even by the standards of tough-guy cinema or a Call of Duty video game. On the field, the bog-standard exchanges between Kinley and his fellow soldiers are filled with touches of homoerotic banter, while a video call home to his two daughters conspicuously exists to signal that he’s a good father. That he becomes entangled in the red tape of the immigration system and the military industrial complex at large is just a means for the filmmakers to insist upon his goodness. Meanwhile, Salim’s Ahmed and his wife (Fariba Sheikhan) are the only Afghans portrayed with anything resembling dignity, and only so because they have nobly turned their back on the Taliban in favor of America.

As for the war itself, Ritchie, Davies, and Atkinson never interrogate American exceptionalism, the effectiveness of brute force tactics, or the logic of a 20-year engagement in a country far removed from the events of 9/11. With the first title screen at the end of The Covenant announcing, eulogy-like, that the Taliban re-established rule as soon as American troops left the area, the filmmakers also implicitly suggest that leaving was a mistake, essentially endorsing the same never-ending warfare that their script initially and half-heartedly criticizes. It may genuinely care for the scores of interpreters left behind in Afghanistan without the safe passage to America that they were promised, but without any other tangible critique of the military or the war more broadly, The Covenant simply reveals its reactionary soul.