A Debt to be Paid

As I’ve noted before, I’m a fan of Guy Ritchie’s films. While I don’t think that everything he’s made is gold, the director has a fairly consistent output that I enjoy. He’s at his best when making slick productions about thugs and lowlifes, having gotten his start doing just that on films like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. His best films play to those strengths, not stepping too far outside his comfort zone so he can focus on what works. Certainly he’s better suited to the likes of The Gentlemen than King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (no matter how inspired a choice it was to try and make Arthur into a British street thug).

But it can’t be denied that the director has an eye. Some of his biggest failures came not because the director actually failed when making his movie, but because the end result didn’t resonate with audiences. Sometimes you can’t even understand why a film failed. Why was the reboot of The Man from UNCLE a complete flop while Sherlock Holmes became a smash success? Both are films based on aged IPs, both directed with Ritchie’s consummate slickness and professionalism. And, arguably, The Man from UNCLE is the far better film in all respects. It’s strange how this sometimes has played out for the director.

And, then we get to The Covenant, a movie that, one would think, would have played very well. It’s Ritchie’s attempt at a kind of Dad Rock film, a movie about war, and soldiers fighting for what’s right, with a healthy bit of American patriotism thrown in as well. It has most of the hallmarks of a Guy Ritchie film (although it does have a notable lack of British street thugs), and it’s done with the same eye for slick, strong visuals that Ritchie has perfected over the years. And yet the film only made $21.9 Mil against a $55 Mil budget. What would seem, from a Hollywood perspective, to be a surefire success died in theaters. What happened?

Well, we could have a debate about how good the film’s story really is. While it’s seemingly designed to tell the real story of Afghani interpreters who worked with American forces during America’s incursion into Afghanistan to take on the Taliban, the film isn’t actually based on a true account. It’s more loosely related to fast while telling its own, fictional account of fictional characters. This drains some of the thrill, and the immediacy, out of the story. Facts are used to create a fake accounting of the war, all so that the best, most thrilling version of events can be told. And without real truth behind the story, it’s harder to get invested in the events as presented.

It’s a weird thing, in fact. While we accept fictional accounts of past wars, allowing characters from the Civil War, or World War II, or any other conflict from before the last fifty years, and we can get invested in those stories, the closer events are to our modern life, the more we expect truth and reality. We know movies are fake, and that details are always changed, but we still want a core kernel of truth to a war story from a recent conflict, and the fact that The Covenant doesn’t have that kernel of real truth, no matter how much it might be trying to tell a story loosely based on real facts, hurts the film for the viewer.

If it were based on a true story, the actual story in the film would be pretty solid. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Master Sgt. John Kinley, the leader of a group of American soldiers that head out into suspected Taliban territory, looking for weapons caches, bomb factories, and anything else that can be used to attack Americans. After losing his previous interpreter, he’s given a selection of new Afghani volunteers, and he settles on Ahmed Abdullah (Dar Salim), a former Taliban soldier who switched sides after the Taliban got his son killed.

While on a mission into Taliban territory, Kinley’s men get pinned down. They steadily get picked off, one by one, until it’s just Kinley and Abdullah in enemy territory. They have to get back to base, on foot, across fifty miles of rough terrain, all while the Taliban searches for them. And when one such raiding party finds the two men, Kinley gets injured, leaving just Abdullah to carry his fallen Sergeant all the way back to base. But even when he gets Kinley back, he’s still stuck in Afghanistan, on his own, as the U.S. hasn’t yet gotten the paperwork together to get him out. It’ll be up to Kinley to go back into enemy territory and repay the favor for his lost brother-in-arms.

The first two acts of the film are, honestly, the best parts. The first act is all setup, letting us learn about Kinley and Abdullah while, slowly, they learn to respect and trust each other. I wouldn’t say the storytelling here is especially good, as it follows a pretty standard set of tropes. Kinley doesn’t trust Abdullah, so Abdullah works extra hard to prove himself, and then grudging respect follows. But the story is elevated by the solid performances of both Gyllenhaal and Salim.

The second act easily outpaces the first as then the film functionally strips all story away as it follows the two men on their harrowing journey across mountains, scrub, and sand. This is solid action filmmaking, with Ritchie clearly relishing being able to tell what is, functionally, a thirty minute action and drama set piece. There’s very little dialogue, just two men working their way forward as, scene by scene, danger comes at them from all sides. It’s pure thrill and momentum, The Covenant at its finest.

It’s in the last act that the pace falls apart. This is where Kinley is on his own, back in America, and he has to stage a rescue for Abdullah. The film drifts from a harrowing journey of two soldiers straight into “America, Fuck Yeah,” storytelling, the kind of Dad Rock plotting you expect from a bad Amazon Prime production. There’s no nuance and none of the kind of character work and plot development we saw from the earlier acts of the film. Gyllenhaal is still good in these scenes, but he doesn’t have nearly as much to do. Everything about this last act feels flatter and less interesting.

It does kind of suck because the film was really clicking for its first two acts, and while it doesn’t completely throw everything away right at the finish line, it does lack the grace and nuance at the goal that it had at the beginning. I could see this turning off a lot of critics, which then in turn would turn off many that would have been in the audience. That, plus the fact that the film isn’t based on any single true account and you have a film that feels a little too fake, a little too much like it’s trying to tap into that Dad Rock film market, no matter what.

The Covenant isn’t Guy Ritchie’s best film, and I won’t even try to argue that it is. It totally falls apart in the last act and that drags what was a really great film down. It’s still very watchable, though, and it’s a great showcase for Ritchie’s skills as a filmmaker. You can tell that he cared about the subject matter, that he was trying to bring attention to the fact that America brought on these interpreters and then left them to twist once the war was over, but he doesn’t do as good a job selling that point as he could. The idea was noble, but the final result is lacking.

In the end, The Covenant is better as a mission statement for the director than as a work you really will want to watch. The director has made better war films (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) and slicker productions (like the aforementioned The Man from UNCLE), but I do respect what Ritchie was trying to do here. The Covenant is flawed but noble, and I’ll take that over another King Arthur: Legend of the Sword any day.