I was initially quite surprised to hear that Guy Ritchie had made a film of this sort since it isn't really what we have come to expect from him. This film takes place in US occupied Afghanistan and while it is not a true story, it has some relationship to actual events. The movie is NOT about something that actually happened but overall it does a pretty fantastic job of showing how terrible the situation must have been over there for a lot of people on either side of the conflict.
When I first caught wind of it, I was thinking I was looking at it wrong since Ritchie's work normally has some sort of gangster edge to it and normally features some level of humor. Obviously there isn't a great deal of comedy in war so I was surprised to see that he even attempted this. I was even more surprised to see that it ended up losing a ton of money off of it's $55 million budget.
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It's not terribly difficult to tell where this film is going and a lot of foreshadowing is done in a rather obvious way. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing because there's only so many twists and turns that a story based in war-torn Afghanistan can take. We all kind of know based on the fact that the movie's central character is definitely Jake Gyllenhaal and his interpreter that we meet really early on in the movie.
I don't feel as though it is much of a spoiler for me to say that Jake's company gets ambushed and overrun by the Taliban and they find themselves stranded far away from any sort of support. Then the two of them have to find a way to survive while being relentlessly pursued by an enemy with far more firepower than they have. It is a bit unrealistic that the two of them have no way of communicating with support, but it is necessary for the storyline.
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If we weren't told that Ritchie was the director of this thing most people probably wouldn't have noticed. This is absolutely NOTHING like Snatch, Lock Stock, or any other popular Ritchie films and I'm honestly a bit curious about what has inspired him to go in this direction.
I am also surprised that this film didn't make any money because it is actually very good. I would say it is one of the better films I have seen in recent months and if it hadn't been for the fact that someone else mentioned it to me I likely wouldn't have even known that this movie exists at all. Also, why is it that this film wasn't released overseas and especially why didn't it see widespread release in Ritchie's home country of the U.k.?
One of the things that I really appreciate about this film is that even though it is a war movie, that is not the central focus of it. It at no point in time becomes some sort of over-the-top Rambo sort of thing and the battle situations seem far more realistic than other war movies where the protagonist seems to just be able to dodge bullets in any situation. Although I have never seen combat, the combat that is featured in this movie seems far more realistic than the usual Arnie or Stallone one-man-army absurdity.
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The cat and mouse aspects of it, the not having unlimited ammunition aspect of things, and the fact that just because you are American doesn't mean your position can't be overwhelmed or detected by people with inferior technology are all aspects of armed conflict that I think are all too frequently misrepresented in films. The Covenant kind of opens your eyes a bit to the horrors of war and there are also a few sequences that are a little bit of "war porn" with really cool tech that is used just enough to please people that enjoy seeing that sort of thing, but not overused to the point where it just starts to get tiresome.
Should I watch it?
If that trailer doesn't entice you I don't know what will. That is an exceptionally well made trailer and it is indicative of what sort of quality you can expect from the rest of the movie. This is so much more than machine gun go boom movie, it is a film about emotions, the red tape of government, and about debts of friendship that will eat a person alive until it is resolved. Jake Gyllenhaal and especially Dar Salim give outstanding performances in this movie and I can't really imagine how this didn't do better than it did in theaters. In an age where stupid carbon-copy superhero movies regularly make hundreds of millions of dollars a relative piece of art like this loses 30 million. I guess that says a lot about the average person these days and what they consider to be entertainment.
I highly suggest you watch this movie and I do not know where it is streaming but it is easy enough to find if you just go a sailin' down by the Bay.
