Guy Ritchie's The Covenant
Guy Ritchie turns on the Taliban in a surprisingly intimate and touching action-thriller.
Dar Salim and Jake Gyllenhaal
There is an irony that Guy Ritchie has chosen to include his name in the title of his latest release – because it’s the least Guy Ritchie-like film he has made (give or take Aladdin). There are no Cockney geezers, no irreverent gags, no cocky braggadocio and no colourful caricatures. There is, though, plenty of action. But here the action serves to illuminate a true-life injustice, a situation in which neither side comes off smelling of roses. An opening caption reveals that by December 2011, the US Army had stationed 98,000 troops in Afghanistan and employed 50,000 Afghan interpreters. The deal was, that for their service, the Afghan interpreters would be provided with special immigration visas and relocation to the US. The word ‘deal’ has other definitions: bond, pledge, covenant... And the word interpreter can be interpreted in other ways, too. For Ahmed Abdullah (Dar Salim), he interprets more than mere words and dialogue – he interprets intentions and lies. He is not a translator.
Another divergence from the Guy Ritchie norm is that in spite of a large cast of US Army personnel – and hundreds more Taliban fighters – Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant is essentially a two-hander. That most under-appreciated leading man Jake Gyllenhaal plays Special Forces Sergeant John Kinley, a soldier tasked with the thankless role of watching his men die in barren, unhospitable surroundings. Behind every rock, every market stall and every copse, or so it seems, lies the telescopic sights of a Taliban AK-47 or M4. Under such conditions, a dry black humour develops between the men, a disposition that Guy Ritchie merely hints at. When his translator Jack Jack is killed in a routine vehicle check, Kinley reluctantly takes a new man under his wing. He is Ahmed Abdullah, a local mechanic who, so he says, is only in it for the money. But as the days pass into weeks, Ahmed repeatedly dispels Kinley’s misgivings and the two men enter an uneasy alliance…
It was a good idea to cast Gyllenhaal. As he has shown time after time, he can balance brawn and vulnerability on a knife edge. He is also an instantly empathetic figure, even when playing an officer in charge pushed to the edge. As the Afghani essentially entrusted with the lives of Kinley’s men, the Baghdad-born Dar Salim (A War) is an equally laconic, staunch presence. He oozes trustworthiness and a quiet inner strength and is essentially the heartbeat of the film. While choosing to paint the Taliban as little more than gun-toting maniacs, Ritchie turns away from presenting a black-and-white picture of the conflict by exposing the bureaucratic hypocrisy of the Americans. As to be expected from the director, the action sequences are efficiently suspenseful, seat-wetting spectacles, backed up by a terrific score from Chris Benstead and swooping drone shots of the more arid reaches of Alicante, in Spain, standing in for Afghanistan. If it never entirely escapes the formula of its genre, it is not without its moments of human detail. It is a rare Ritchie film, indeed, that permits a scene of a grown man crying from the strain of it all.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim, Antony Starr, Alexander Ludwig, Sean Sagar, Bobby Schofield, Emily Beecham, Jonny Lee Miller, Jason Wong, James Nelson-Joyce, Rhys Yates, Christian Ochoa Lavernia, Fariba Sheikhan, Ash Goldeh.
Dir Guy Ritchie, Pro Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, John Friedberg and Josh Berger, Screenplay Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, Ph Ed Wild, Pro Des Martyn John, Ed James Herbert, Music Chris Benstead, Costumes Loulou Bontemps, Dialect coach Huma Masoumi.
STXfilms/Toff Guy Films-Amazon Media.
122 mins. 2022. UK/Spain/USA. UK and US Rel: 21 April 2023. Cert. 15.
