The Covenant (2023)
★★☆☆☆
Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Written by: Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies, and Guy Ritchie
The Covenant has the pastiche and air of a "based on the true story" war film, although it is an original story that dramatizes some legitimate issues faced by Afghans who served as interpreters for the US military during the two-decade long war in Afghanistan. The plot follows Sergeant John Kinley (played a bit unevenly by Jake Gyllenhaal) and his squad of soldiers as they fruitlessly search for locations where the Taliban may be manufacturing or storing explosive devices. When their interpreter is killed in a bomb attack (that's not a spoiler, it happens in the first five minutes of the film), Kinley's squad is assigned a replacement named Ahmed (Dar Salim in a standout, potentially star-making performance).
With Ahmed's help and some unconventional tactics, Kinley and his squad close in on a legitimate IED factory. But when they arrive, one of the workers notifies the local Taliban leaders of the Americans' presence and discovery of their stash. As the Taliban close in, Kinley's squad is picked apart and Kinley and Ahmed are separated from everyone, ultimately forced to flee on foot. What follows is a very protracted chase sequence culminating in Kinley being seriously wounded. Ahmed bandages the sergeant up and starts off to drag, carry, and care for Kinley across over 100 kilometers of Taliban-controlled territory.
Eventually Ahmed is successful in saving Kinley, who wakes up weeks later in the hospital. Once back home in the States, Kinley is haunted by grief and remorse once he learns that Ahmed has been forced into hiding for his actions, becoming something of an anti-Taliban folk hero. The third act of the movie is then an extended rescue mission where Kinley returns to Afghanistan in an attempt to locate and extract Ahmed and his family to the US.
It's sort of an interesting structure for this particular story. I think a lot of screenwriters (or perhaps editors) would typically focus on a more protracted third act and either deal with Ahmed's perilous journey in flashbacks or intersperse it throughout Kinley's rescue mission. Here, though, the events are depicted linearly which puts the bulk of the film's runtime on the second act. It's a pretty great second act, to be sure, full of high stakes escapes, and a truly exhausting level of heightened tension. This is where Dar Salim truly shines and his character is displayed through a handful of dialogue-free actions and pivotal decision points.
The bridge between this sequence and Kinley's decision to return to try and save Ahmed is where the film broke down for me. Gyllenhaal's wooden stoicism from the first act is replaced by a see-saw between extra wooden and over-the-top ham as he rages against the system dragging their feet about securing Ahmed's immigration visa. I get that he was going for a PTSD effect and perhaps the editors did him no favors, but it just didn't work for me. There are a few other odd choices in this section as well: Johnny Lee Miller's Colonel Vokes is hinted at having a deeper backstory connection with Kinley than was previously indicated, Alexander Ludwig's strangely menacing turn as Sergeant Declan O'Brady takes a momentarily prominent role, and poor Emily Beecham as Kinley's wife Caroline puts up a valiant struggle to adopt a convincing American accent in the one single monologue of substance she gets, but ultimately the writing and her accent torpedo the scene. Ultimately it culminates in a tedious subplot where Kinley tries to hire and then convince a private military contractor (played beardily and pointlessly by Antony Starr) to honor a deal, which of course fails, leading Kinley to believe he has to go in to save Ahmed and his family all by himself. (For some inexplicable reason this turns out to all be a big misunderstanding, which doesn’t matter in the least except that to me it kind of neatly encapsulated how roughshod and arbitrary the whole screenplay feels.)
All of which amounts to a dull interlude leading up to the very abbreviated-feeling escape scene that merely sets up a deus ex machina moment which might be the most unsatisfying denoument in recent memory.
In the end, then, the film is quite a mixed bag. Ritchie is great at blocking complex pursuit and combat scenes, and he knows how to create an atmosphere of tension without much dialogue. The cinematography is generally excellent, too, which is probably why the firefight-into-Kinley-and-Ahmed-escape is the best sequence of the whole film, even if narratively it should have been either the entire movie or edited into the rescue scenes instead. There are too many characters introduced in the beginning who end up getting basically zero development other than some colorful nicknames; there is too much clumsiness in the non-action scenes both in terms of acting and directing; and the whole thing feels like the producers were trying to treat real-life characters and circumstances with an appropriate level of gravitas and sincerity that a wholly fictional story doesn't require.
More so than anything else though the film feels like what it really needed was some kind of purpose, a point of view, some kind of message or position to take. It doesn't really have much to say about the US's war in Afghanistan in general, and barely has enough of an opinion about the treatment of Afghan interpreters serving the US military and their treatment both by the US and by the Taliban outside a small title card at the end of the film. It doesn't attempt to illuminate a broader topic or even make any commentary on this conflict and seems content to assume everyone watching it will view the Taliban as generically evil and the US military as generically noble.
Despite some promising elements, I can't fully recommend The Covenant. It doesn't work as a popcorn flick because it's a bit too self-serious and hampers itself with an awkward structure. And it can't even claim to try to be a thoughtful meditation on self-sacrifice, war, or the plight of the average citizens of a war-torn country as it never bothers to take a stance on much of anything. What's left are some slickly produced but disjointed action scenes, one great performance, and a lot of close-but-not-quite work by everyone else. Catch it on streaming services in a month if you have nothing better to watch, but it's not worth making a special effort to see in theaters.
