Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant shows that Guy Ritchie is back

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant follows US Army Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim). After an ambush, Ahmed goes to Herculean lengths to save Kinley’s life. When Kinley learns that Ahmed and his family were not given safe passage to America as promised, he must repay his debt by returning to the war zone to retrieve them before the Taliban hunts them down.

REVIEW

Guy Ritchie fans wanted Guy Ritchie back. The Guy Ritchie of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and RocknRolla was not the same Guy Ritchie of Sherlock Holmes (though it did at least feel like him), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and the most fan-reviled of them all, the live-action Aladdin remake. They feared he may be gone forever.

But when he returned to his Jason Statham roots with an underseen and underrated Wrath of Man and the less loved but still familiarly-flavored Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, his fans cheered.

His latest effort, the eponymous Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, now on Blu-ray and DVD from MGM, is something to cheer for. It’s excellent. And Ritchie is back.

It’s a difficult film to explain, as it looks like an early 2000s ‘War on Terror’ drama/thriller — one that could easily play like a Call of Duty mission. It does have that feeling from time to time, but largely scraps conventional story structure and generic film sensibilities. Even the plot itself is difficult to nail down in just a summary. For example, the plot synopsis available on The Movie Database states ‘During the war in Afghanistan, a local interpreter risks his own life to carry an injured sergeant across miles of grueling terrain.’ That is, at best, one piece of this movie’s puzzle — one that takes place for around ten minutes, halfway through the movie.

It begins in March of 2018, as United States Army Master Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in need of a new local interpreter, as a Taliban-orchestrated bombing killed his most recent one. Ahmed Abdullah (Dar Salim) is paired with Kinley (in exchange for an American visa) and the two instantly butt heads. Kinley is a high-ranking, know-it-all, master of his own domain, and Abdullah insists on going off-script to better reach the locals.

When Abdullah steps in to call off a mission, fearing that it would lead to the death of Kinley’s team (it would have), the Master Sergeant takes issue with Abdullah feeling like he can do anything but translate:

Kinley: ‘You’re out of bounds, Ahmed. You’re here to translate.’
Abdullah: ‘Actually, I’m here to interpret.’

That is, of course, the thematic center of a movie that only takes off from there. Kinley’s IED (improvised explosive device) expertise is how he’s made it this far and become so good at his job of … hunting down and raiding IED labs. But it does nothing for him when it comes to understanding the people of Afghanistan and especially those of the Taliban. That is Ahmed’s expertise, of course, reading between the lines, understanding what’s not being said. That’s how he’s made it this far, staying alive after defecting from the Taliban.

But when a mission goes wrong and Kinley’s team is all but wiped out, the film begins to approach this idea, and the basic plot synopsis, of the men finding value in the other’s skills to survive.

It very nearly avoids being a basic story of brotherhood, from a brothers-in-arms jingoistic tale to that of blurred lines across a country’s borders. It instead opts to just be a story of two men collaborating on a shared goal, never pretending to speak for the America-Afghanistan relationship at large. One may take that away from the film and that would be fine, but its larger geopolitical implications play second-fiddle to the story of these two men.

As the film projects in its final moments, covenant: a bond, a pledge, a commitment.

Those two men, of course, are played by two great actors. Gyllenhaal can be difficult to nail down, but he’s retreading two-decades-old emotional territory from Sam Mendes’s similar 2005 film Jarhead, one could even see Gyllenhaal playing the same character at different ages. Dar Salim as Ahmed is the film’s emotional core, the only main character who straddles the lines of both being Afghan and working for the United States. His desires and dreams are never spelled out in either Pashto, Dari, or English, but on his face, behind his eyes, and through his sweat. It’s a performance in more than just language that still manages to get everything across. He’s excellent.

As for Ritchie, yes, it’s a return to form. Is he commenting on the style of the American war genre or is he participating in it? Does style assume approval? Does he have something to say about the War on Terror or does he want you to have something to say? It’s Ritchie at his best because his best always seems to find purpose in ambiguity.

VIDEO

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The video quality is top-tier for a Blu-ray disc. Cinematographer Ed Wild shoots Spain in place of Afghanistan on 6K Sonys. The colors are crisp and the geography is well-defined. You will rarely catch me promoting home video over the cinema experience, but I would be shocked if most multiplex projectors played this movie this clearly. For those that missed it in theaters, you did’t miss anything because the home experience is as good or better.

AUDIO

The Dolby Atmos track is clear and well-mixed for the home video experience. Much of the film takes place in the previously-mentioned languages and is heavily subtitled to begin with, but the disc does feature both English and Spanish subtitle tracks.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Not a single bonus feature, a downside of an otherwise excellent disc.

OVERVIEW

Box office numbers suggest that many missed this one in the theater. Now is the time to correct that mistake and watch this disc, which is strong from its presentation to its action.

Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment generously provided Hotchka with the Blu-ray for reviewing purposes.

The Covenant has a running time of 2 hours 3 minutes and is rated R for violence, language throughout and brief drug content.