- UK release: June 2023 (Amazon Prime Video)
- Director: Guy Ritchie · Writers: Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies
- Studio / distributor: STXfilms; Toff Guy Films; MGM
- Genre: War thriller / rescue drama · Runtime: 123 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler, Source Code) as Sergeant John Kinley; Dar Salim (Game of Thrones) as Ahmed; Antony Starr (Banshee) as Eddie Parker; Alexander Ludwig (Lone Survivor) as Declan O’Brady
- IMDb: 7.5 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 83% critics / 98% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Guy Ritchie has spent twenty-five years selling a particular kind of cheek: London villains, snappy edits, voiceover that explains the con while the con is still happening. So the first surprise of The Covenant is the title screen telling you his name twice and then the film proceeding to leave the trademark almost entirely at the door. This is Ritchie working in a register he has rarely touched, a sober, plainly shot war thriller with no smirk in it, and it suits him better than his recent comedies suggested it would.
The setup
Afghanistan, 2018. Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) leads a small army unit hunting Taliban weapons caches, and his survival depends on his interpreter, a local man named Ahmed (Dar Salim) who reads a room, a road and a lie far faster than any of the soldiers around him. When a mission goes wrong and Kinley is left badly wounded deep in hostile country, it is Ahmed who drags him, sometimes literally, across miles of open ground to safety, at enormous cost to himself. The second half turns the obligation around. Back home, recovering and increasingly unable to live with the debt, Kinley learns that the promised visa protecting Ahmed and his family has not materialised, and that the man who saved him is now being hunted. So he goes back. The film is built on that simple moral weight, one life owed and one man determined to repay it, and it does not need to complicate it.
The cast
Gyllenhaal has always been good at private torment, and Kinley’s guilt is the kind of role he can do in his sleep, except he does not sleep through it; he plays the recovery stretch as a man being eaten alive by something he cannot name to anyone around him. The real find is Dar Salim, who could have been a noble plot device and instead gives Ahmed a watchful, unsentimental intelligence that quietly takes over the first hour. The two of them barely trust each other early on, and the slow turn from professional wariness to something owed is the best thing in the film. Antony Starr brings a welcome flintiness as the contractor Kinley leans on, and Alexander Ludwig and the rest of the unit are sketched economically rather than fleshed out, which is the one place the script shows its hurry.
The craft
Ritchie shoots this straight. Ed Wild’s photography favours dust, distance and cold daylight over anything stylised, and the action is staged for clarity rather than flash, which is exactly right for material this earnest. The long retreat across country is genuinely tense, paced as a war of attrition rather than a set piece, and Christopher Benstead’s score leans on a low, insistent pulse that keeps the screws turning without telling you how to feel. There is no voiceover, no chapter cards, no needle-drop swagger. Editor James Herbert keeps two hours moving at a clip while still letting the quiet stretches breathe. It is the most controlled filmmaking Ritchie has put his name to in a long while.
How it stacks up
The obvious neighbours are Lone Survivor and 13 Hours, the modern soldiers-in-a-hard-place pictures, and The Covenant sits comfortably alongside them while being less interested in firefight spectacle and more in the bond at the centre. It has none of the moral ambiguity of The Hurt Locker; this is a film with a clear hero and a clear wrong to right, and it commits to that without apology. The more interesting comparison is internal. Set this beside The Gentlemen or the Sherlock Holmes films and you would struggle to believe the same director made them. Ritchie usually wants you to admire how clever he is being. Here he gets out of the way of the story, and the restraint is the achievement.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come round to it, sitting in the low eighties, with the recurring note being mild surprise that Ritchie can play it this straight and pull it off. Audiences have gone considerably further, up near the high nineties, which tells you the emotional contract lands hard with people who simply want it to pay off. The reservation worth airing is that the film softens a messy, unresolved real-world scandal, the abandonment of Afghan interpreters by the governments they served, into a clean redemption arc. It earns its catharsis honestly on its own terms, but it is a film that resolves what history did not.
Verdict
This is a lean, sincere, well-made thriller that knows exactly what it is and does not overreach. The two lead performances carry real weight, the craft is disciplined throughout, and the central debt gives it a moral spine that most films in this lane lack. It loses a point for thinning out its supporting cast and for tidying a story that deserved some of its untidiness. But it grips, it moves, and it is the kind of solid adult action-drama I will happily put on again. The biggest compliment I can pay it is that you forget whose film it is and just watch the two men. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the UK from June 2023, after its US cinema run earlier in the spring.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled into a reputation as Ritchie’s most respected dramatic outing, the one critics point to when arguing he has more range than the geezer comedies suggest. It remains on Prime Video in the UK, with a Blu-ray and digital release for anyone who wants it off the platform.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, bloody images, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes of strong violence feature characters being shot, with resultant blood spurts. Characters are slashed with knives and their throats are cut, and others are strangled.
Injury detail: After a man is shot, a bloody gunshot wound is visible on his face, as a pool of blood spreads behind his body on the ground.
Language: There is use of strong language (‘f**k’) as well as milder terms (‘ass’, ‘shit’, ‘bastard’, ‘God’, ‘damn’).
Additional issues: There is a brief scene in which a man lights an opium pipe he intends to use for pain relief. References are made to characters selling heroin. There are sequences of moderate threat in which characters are in danger from enemy gunfire or explosions. There are moderate sex references, including when a man’s nickname is revealed to be ‘Jizzy’.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
