As I commented last week, I was expecting to be buying a ticket to see Russel Crowe on the big screen this week. But Friday, as I was having dinner with Mrs AGMR, I went online to check movie times for Saturday and noticed a new war movie starring the awesome Jake Gyllenhaal – The Covenant. I watched the trailor and said to Mrs AGMR ‘Oh, we have a winner!’. I am happy to say, it was an excellent call.
ALERT: there is a VERY SLIGHT SPOILER coming, but nothing that you didn’t guess just by watching the trailer, sooooo……..there ya go.
I would not put The Covenant in the same stratosphere as Top Gun: Maverick. But Guy Ritchie (who rarely disappoints) surely took a page from their playbook. This movie was solid butt-clenching drama almost start to finish. The plot was easily predictable and it is a testimony to the writers, director and actors (Dar Salim was spectacular) that we were on the edge of our seats even knowing how it would end. Think Apollo 13…history already told us how it all ended and we were still teary-eyed when we heard Tom Hanks’ crackly transmission ‘Hello Houston. This is Odessy. It’s good to see you again’.
Its worth stating from the outset that this movie definitely did not include any wokeness, no virtue signaling, not even an SJW tip-of-the-hat. If anything, there was even a subtle pro-american esprit de corps. It did manage to depict incredibly strong female characters that were actually germane to the story and not shoe horned in for the sake of…whatever. Emily Beecham ran a successful classic car restoration business and raised two kids while Jake Gyllenhaal was busy kicking @$$ in the desert. Fariba Sheikhan kept her family’s shite tight while her husband did what he could to fight the Taliban. To put a point on it, the epilogue stated the verifiable fact that over 300 Afghani nationals and their families were left behind and subsequently murdered after our horribly mishandled withdrawl in 2021. So yeah, it didn’t go over the top in either direction. The epilogue statement wasn’t even necessary to the story, so its inclusion felt a little like a shot across the bow to the anti-American mindset. Almost as if somebody realized that making a GOOD pro-American movie would be a success for the studio. Shocker.
Okay, down to brass tacks. Obviously, I heartily recommend this movie. I saw it at the earliest evening showing and the theater was fairly packed. That is pretty incredible given that I had not seen any trailer for it. Heck, I hadn’t even heard of it before Friday. And I pay a LOT of attention to coming attractions. A LOT. I’m giving The Covenant 4.5 out of 5…high praise, indeed. And since I’m ever an optimist, I’m hopeful that this flick is saying to us ‘Hello, America. This is patriotism. It’s good to see you again!’.