Skip to main content

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant review: a well-crafted military thriller

Dar Salim and Jake Gyllenhaal sit in a military Humvee together in The Covenant.
Guy Ritchie's The Covenant
“Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is another thrilling action flick from its director that not only cements Ritchie's status as one of Hollywood's last reliable craftsman, but also announces Dar Salim as a star worth paying closer attention to.”
Pros
  • Dar Salim's star-making lead turn
  • Several thrilling action set pieces
  • Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim's believable on-screen chemistry
Cons
  • A slightly rushed third act
  • Cringeworthy dialogue throughout
  • A political message that doesn't feel as sharp as it could

There is no mainstream filmmaker alive right now who seems as content with making middlebrow action thrillers as Guy Ritchie. To be fair, there’s also no director working today who is quite as good at doing it as Ritchie. The filmmaker came up in the 1990s and 2000s during a period when action directors couldn’t rely on CGI to do as much of the work for them as many do now, and that shows in Ritchie’s work. Even when his films don’t quite narratively or tonally hold together as well as one would like, there’s never a question that Ritchie still knows exactly how to place and move his camera at any given moment.

That was true in his offering earlier this year, the underrated crime comedy flick Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and it’s true once again in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. The new film is a straightforward, sincerely made military thriller that rarely handles its moments of melodrama or emotional introspection as well as it could, but is nonetheless never anything but wholly engaging. More than anything, it proves once again that there simply are not many directors working right now who are better at navigating the lost art of the midbudget action movie than Ritchie.

Jake Gyllenhaal kneels over Dar Salim in Guy Ritchie's The Covenant.
Christopher Raphael/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Co-written by Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, and Marn Davies, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant follows John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), a U.S. military sergeant who suffers an unexpected loss in the film’s intense, surprisingly succinct opening scene. The death of one of his soldiers leads to John crossing paths with Ahmed (Dar Salim), an Afghan interpreter who is inducted into John’s squadron in order to help it locate and destroy some of the Taliban’s hidden explosive sites. In his role, Ahmed quickly proves himself as someone who is willing to disobey orders in order to save the lives of himself and the other men in his unit.

While he and John frequently butt heads throughout The Covenant’s first act, the two characters are forced to depend on each other after one of their missions takes a deadly turn. When Gyllenhaal’s determined military leader is nearly killed shortly afterward, Salim’s Ahmed takes it upon himself to safely transport the injured John across dangerous enemy territory for several days and nights. In doing so, Ahmed unknowingly creates a debt between him and John that the latter feels compelled to repay in The Covenant’s rousing but uneven final third.

Clocking in at just over 2 hours long, The Covenant’s story is essentially divided into three parts: John and Ahmed’s first missions together, Ahmed’s quest to keep John alive, and John’s journey to rescue Ahmed from the Taliban forces that want to kill him for aiding the U.S. military. For the most part, Ritchie and company manage to move through all three sections at a consistently engaging pace, though the film’s third act does feel significantly more rushed than its first two. There’s a similar unevenness present in The Covenant’s overall depiction of both Ahmed and John.

Dar Salim pushes Jake Gyllenhaal on a wooden cart in Guy Ritchie's The Covenant.
Christopher Raphael/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Gyllenhaal plays his Covenant soldier with a level of intensity that moviegoers have come to expect from the actor, which makes it easier to buy into his character’s overwhelming sense of honor. The film’s script doesn’t, however, know how to explore John’s inner turmoil over his debt to Ahmed without veering too far into melodrama. That’s particularly true of two monologues Gyllenhaal gives in the second half of The Covenant, first to his wife, Caroline (Emily Beecham), and the other to his former commanding officer, Col. Vokes (Jonny Lee Miller). In both cases, what should be invigorating and emotionally moving moments of vulnerability for Gyllenhaal’s John instead come across as wooden and stiff.

The film’s handling of Ahmed’s story fortunately feels far more compelling and nuanced, as does Salim’s star-making performance as the mournful, honorable interpreter. Driven into the military conflict by a devastating personal loss, Ahmed’s strength and desire to protect those he feels responsible for are made constantly apparent by Salim, who manages to communicate his character’s biggest moments of panic and fear even when he’s forced to tamp them down. Without Salim’s quiet, resolute performance, The Covenant wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.

That’s particularly true of Ahmed’s difficult mission to simultaneously escort Gyllenhaal’s John to safety and elude their Taliban pursuers. Behind the camera, Ritchie doesn’t shy away from showcasing the physical and mental demands of Ahmed’s journey. Whether he’s spending several minutes on Ahmed’s undercover interactions with Taliban soldiers or highlighting just how soul-crushing something as simple as rolling a wooden cart up a hill can become, Ritchie ensures that viewers feel the full weight of Ahmed’s quest. Salim’s performance, meanwhile, matches the intensity of Ritchie’s direction.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Antony Starr look across a table at each other in Guy Ritchie's The Covenant.
Christopher Raphael/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Ahmed’s journey, as well as the attack that leaves him and Gyllenhaal’s John stranded in the first place, are the strongest and most effective sections of The Covenant. The latter sequence, which follows John, Ahmed, and the rest of their military unit as a seemingly successful mission begins to take a series of increasingly bad turns, is expertly well-constructed by Ritchie. The director pulls off the difficult feat of making sure you feel the chaos and growing desperation of the sequence without ever feeling the need to sacrifice the scene’s visual legibility. Ritchie achieves a similar trick at other points in The Covenant, including in the film’s rushed, but technically impressive climactic action sequence.

In its final moments, Ritchie attempts to make a political statement with The Covenant — namely, that the U.S. military failed to treat its Afghan interpreters as well as it should have before it pulled out of Afghanistan. While admirable, the film’s action-movie preoccupations prevent its political message from landing as hard as Ritchie and his collaborators likely intended. Like many of Ritchie’s films, though, The Covenant still stands on its own as an entertaining and consistently engaging action thriller — one that succeeds on the strength of not only its two stars’ on-screen chemistry, but also the reliable and oft-underappreciated talent of its director.

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant is now playing in theaters.

Alex Welch
Alex is a TV and movies writer based out of Los Angeles. In addition to Digital Trends, his work has been published by…
Resurrection review: a gripping and unpredictable thriller
Rebecca Hall stands next to a mirrored wall in Resurrection.

Rebecca Hall is a force of nature. If her performances in films like The Night House and Christine hadn’t already proven that, her work in Resurrection does. The new psychological thriller from writer-director Andrew Semans stars Hall as a woman whose life is thrown into disarray when a man from her past unexpectedly returns. The film's premise makes it out to be a fairly straightforward thriller, but Resurrection is anything but that.

Rather than taking the obvious path, Semans uses his heroine’s unfortunate twist of fate as a launchpad to send Resurrection into increasingly unexpected and disturbing psychological places. The film, which runs just 103-minutes long, is a Cronenbergian descent into madness — one that feels as deeply indebted to the work of filmmakers like David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman as, say, Brian De Palma. At its best, Resurrection is able to achieve a kind of nightmarish dream logic that is as disconcerting as it is involving.

Read more
The Black Phone review: A spooky, surface-level thriller
A ghost stands next to Finney in The Black Phone.

The Black Phone is at its best when it's working with as little as possible. A majority of the new film from Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson takes place in a grimy basement, but it manages to make the most out of its central confined space — filling it with intimidating shadows and secrets for its protagonist to discover over the course of The Black Phone’s 102-minute runtime. Based on a short story of the same name by Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill, the film follows a young boy who gets kidnapped by a notorious child killer and has only a few days to escape before he becomes the man’s next victim.

The film’s premise supplies it with an easy-to-grasp conflict and enough tension to sustain a feature-length story, and when The Black Phone actually focuses on its young protagonist’s efforts to escape from the soundproofed basement he’s found himself trapped in, it works as a visceral, occasionally spooky horror-thriller. It’s when The Black Phone attempts to bend its thriller plot to be compatible with certain themes about abuse and self-esteem, however, that the film comes up disappointingly short.
Calls from the other side

Read more
Spiderhead review: Chris Hemsworth shines in slick thriller
Chris Hemsworth smirks in front of a mi crophone in a scene from Spiderhead.

Netflix hasn't found much middle ground when it comes to high-profile original films. The projects produced by the streaming studio have typically been critical darlings that generate heaps of awards buzz (i.e., Mank or Roma) or forgettable flops that deliver the Hollywood equivalent of setting a mountain of money on fire. The sci-fi drama Spiderhead is the rare exception, delivering a clever, satisfying thriller that manages to avoid underselling or overselling its premise.

Directed by Top Gun: Maverick filmmaker Joseph Kosinski from a script penned by Deadpool and Zombieland duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Spiderhead is based on George Saunders' short story Escape from Spiderhead. The film casts Marvel Studios veteran Chris Hemsworth as the overseer of a futuristic, free-roaming prison where the inmates have volunteered for tests with experimental, emotion-controlling drugs in exchange for reduced sentences. Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick, Whiplash) portrays a prisoner who begins to suspect something is amiss in the experiments and attempts to find a way to protect both himself and a fellow inmate he cares for, who is played by Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country).

Read more