I haven’t been fair to Guy Ritchie. Hell, if we’re being honest, I haven’t been that fair to his ex Madonna either, given how I blamed her for Ritchie’s downturn after Snatch; that shit isn’t cool. And neither is how I’ve been framing Guy Ritchie’s films for as long as I’ve been looking at them on here. Having grown up with Snatch, I had a concrete idea in my mind that that is what Guy Ritchie was good at, viewing pretty much everything else that came after it as him trying to diversify into new areas and stepping out of his reach. While I still stand by some of that criticism of him making films that don’t fit his strengths (e.g. the Aladdin remake), thinking that he absolutely must keep making snarky Brit-hard comedic crime dramas for the rest of his career just isn’t reasonable. And it’s only with his latest that I finally got around to understanding that about the guy.
Ostensibly, despite the makeover into an thrilling war actioner, this still shows Guy Ritchie being Guy Ritchie. His laddish sense of humour and approach to character banter fits in with the expected macho bonding of a war flick, and the way he stages and photographs the shootouts in particular shows that he’s sticking with his Michael Mann worship from Wrath Of Man. But there’s a real sense of refinement to the presentation here, showing a series of incredibly tense and even chilling skirmishes where Green Beret John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim) are in a proper fights for their lives. It bypasses the aloofness Ritchie usually presents his action with, and replaces it with a worthy understanding of war as something horrifying for those fighting it as well as those caught in the crossfire.
That refinement follows through into the writing as well, as Ritchie and his regular collaborators Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies hit a genuine milestone with their dialogue here. In just about every other Ritchie film, there are characters who bicker and talk shit to each other, usually as a means of establishing a sense of rapport between them or just trying to intimidate others into backing the fuck off. However, even as delivered by the better performers Ritchie can gather, that rapport only managed to reach the point of ‘they’re comfortable with each other’. Whereas here, especially with Kinley and Ahmed, that goes further into ‘these people genuinely care about each other’.
Indeed, it’s the growing bond between those characters that carries the story around them, with both Kinley and Ahmed consistently shown to look out for each other and going the extra mile to honour the titular Covenant. In Ahmed’s case, he ends up lugging Kinley across vast stretches of Afghan landscape in a wooden kart, and in Kinley’s, the second half of the film primarily involves him trying to get Ahmed and his family out of the country and safely into the U.S.
It's with that specific plot point that the film’s deeper message comes through, and it’s honestly one of the most mature statements to ever come out of a Guy Ritchie joint: Calling out the unfulfilled promises made by the U.S. during the War On Terror. Now, I could easily derail this entire review by getting all the myriad of reasons why American intervention in the Middle East has never gone well, and how some of the worst moments in contemporary U.S. history can be directly linked to their actions in the regions. But that’s all well-trodden ground for this blog at this point, and quite frankly, that specifically isn’t even where the real message comes from.
Instead, it’s with how that Covenant affects the overall relationship between the U.S. military and the anti-Taliban Afghanis, including those who like Ahmed that were enlisted to work with the military as interpreters. Through Gyllenhaal delivering one of his iconic freakouts while on-hold with Immigration Services, the film makes emphatically clear that the U.S. let down the Afghani people because they arrived with the promise that they would make things right, and save those who helped them. A promise that, historically, didn’t pan out, considering how their evacuation wasn't thought through all that well when the War officially ended and the U.S., true to form, left the place in worse condition than they found it in.
With its focus on brotherhood and doing right by those who do right by you, it brings a tumultuous and still-painful topic to a poignantly emotional and personal level, with the relationship between Kinley and Ahmed serving as a microcosm for what the U.S. should have been doing from the start. Like, if the U.S. simply had to be involved in the conflict to begin with, the absolute bare fucking minimum should be that they honour the agreements they themselves established. By emphasising the terror of being on the frontline, even more so for the Afghanis who went against the Taliban than the U.S. soldiers, it shows the conviction they possessed to be part of the resistance effort and demands that they be recognised for what they risked and what far too many of them didn’t gain.
This is one of the best films Guy Ritchie has ever put together. And this isn’t just because of the middling average of quality he’s been showing over the past decade. This is one of his best because it shows him showing some genuine maturity in how he approaches the stories he tells. He doesn’t completely abandon the traits that made him so noteworthy in the beginning, but instead builds on them and pushes them to deliver a level of emotionality and nuance that, truth be told, I didn’t even think he was capable of. It’s the kind of Important shift in tone that Michael Bay attempted with 13 Hours, but this actually succeeds because Ritchie acknowledged the limits of his usual schtick and wanted to do better. And do better he did, as even outside of the underlying messaging, the action thrills on offer here are top-shelf.
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