GUY RITCHIE'S THE COVENANT - Mark Reviews Movies

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 20, 2023

The story, theme, and emotional impact of Guy Ritchie's The Covenant revolve around a single notion of moral simplicity. When someone saves another's life, said person owes that life to the savior. Co-writer/director Guy Ritchie's film cuts through the complications of the politics, the history, and the consequences of the United States' war in Afghanistan to get at something so unquestionable that it is essentially an unmistakable, universal truth.

Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, and Marn Davies' screenplay is a work of fiction—unless some tale is so classified or off-the-books that there's no public record of it. That doesn't lessen its effectiveness, of course, but it is worth noting, if only because the movies—especially of late, it seems—have trained us to believe that only dramatizations of true stories in certain matters are the ones worth telling. Most of those dramatized "real-life" stories end up being fiction to some degree, anyway, so it's slightly refreshing to watch a story, which feels as if it could have actually happened, and learn that its sense of purpose, as well as its apparent authenticity, is just the result of fine storytelling.

The story here, set in what would reveal themselves to be the waning years of the war in Afghanistan, follows Sgt. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), the leader of an Army unit tasked with searching for and dismantling Taliban operations in the manufacturing of improvised explosive devices. At a roadblock checkpoint in the opening scene, two members of his squad, an American soldier and a local interpreter working for U.S. forces, are killed by a truck bomb.

Despite those casualties, the work goes on for John and his team, as things had at the time in Afghanistan since October 2001, as some opening text reminds us, and as more than a thousand U.S. soldiers in the country turned to hundreds of thousands serving there. The number of local interpreters, either working directly for the U.S. military or as part of the Afghan military, is substantial, too, according to that opening. Additionally, the promise to them is that they will qualify for special visas, for themselves and their families, to immigrate to the United States when their service or the war is finished.

That's all the background there is to this story, because it is all that is necessary for the screenplay to make its dramatic and broader points. This is a smart move, which evades any political, ideological, or strategic controversies that could arise and narrows the focus squarely to the numbers, as well as the vital and dangerous role of interpreters within the broader conflict.

One such translator is a man named Ahmed (Dar Salim), whom John chooses to serve as his team's new interpreter, on account of his experience as a mechanic and his forthright attitude. Ahmed proves himself to be knowledgeable about local population and its complex business relationships with the Taliban, and if he butts heads with his commanding officer over matters of paying off a possible informant and suspecting an embedded Afghan solider of conspiring with the Taliban, Ahmed is regularly on the correct side of the debate.

The narrative here is cleanly divided in two, with the first half or so detailing the team's work, John's determination to get the job done, and the rising importance of Ahmed to the accomplishment of that mission. Through those scenes, we see the constant tail-chasing of misinformation and failed leads.

More to the point, there's a mutual level of understanding and respect that develops between John, who has a wife (played by Emily Beecham) and two kids waiting at home, and Ahmed. The interpreter's own family history, which John learns secondhand (a detail that reveals a bit of his single-minded, slightly impersonal nature), is a tragic one. There's a quietly devastating comment later in the film, as John discovers that Ahmed has talked about him and specifically his blue eyes, that hints at just how deep the wounds of this otherwise stoic man's past go.

The script is filled with such succinctness of dialogue, both in terms of military jargon (Titles appear on screen to define certain terminology, because the soldiers speaking it don't have the time or a rationale to explain them to an audience) and in getting to the core of what makes these characters tick. Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal and Salim, an Iraqi actor receiving his most substantial role in a film outside his country, are both sturdy presences in their respective roles, and each one is especially strong in letting curt statements or unspoken sentiments speak the volumes they need to about these characters.

The second half of the story should remain undescribed here except in vague terms. It follows a fierce and chaotic firefight (staged with a frightening sense of confusion and being overwhelmed at every turn), a foot chase across unforgiving terrain, and a cross-country game of cat-and-mouse with Taliban fighters. At the lengthy sequence's heart is an extended act of physical endurance and sacrifice that is powerful, simply because it is done reflexively, without question, and with little to no concern for the safety and well-being of the man performing the grueling task.

A clear-cut and formulaic way of telling this story, perhaps, would find the natural ending with this film's mid-point climax. Here, though, the filmmakers see it, not as a conclusion, but as a question in need of an answer. There are long, irritatingly repetitive phone calls within a system that doesn't work, and when those system do fail at acknowledging and performing some basic humanity, it's up to individuals to do what needs to be done.

The question at the center of the second half, of course, is how one repays the ultimate debt. The intrinsic power of Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is that, when it comes time for that debt to be honored, it is not a question for the character who owes it, just as there is no doubt in the act that led to it. Some things are that simple, and if the film does have a more significant point to make, it's that such debts deserve and demand honoring on a scale much larger than that of the individual—notably in the aftermath of United States' longest war.

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