The Covenant Review

Guy Ritchie strips out the fast cutting and the wisecracking crooks here, and the discipline suits him. Dar Salim does the heavy lifting as Ahmed, the interpreter who hauls a wounded sergeant across miles of hostile ground on a cart, watchful and proud and almost wordless, and that long middle stretch through rock and scrub is the most patient sequence Ritchie has shot. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Kinley as a man whose guilt has gone physical, sleepless and sweating in a bright California kitchen while nobody on the phone can tell him anything.

The ambush at the mine is staged with real clarity about who is standing where, which is rarer in modern war pictures than it should be, and the scene of Ahmed reading a lie off a detainee in a doorway says more about the job than any of the briefings do. The second half is weaker. Once the private money and the helicopters arrive, the film settles into a competent extraction thriller with a Taliban that exists mainly to be shot at, and the closing text about visa backlogs reaches for a moral seriousness that the last twenty minutes has not earned.