The Covenant ★★★

IF YOU accept the saying ‘you’re only as good as your last film’ Guy Ritchie would be in trouble.

Last year’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was very average.

But if you take his last three films – adding Wrath of Man and The Gentlemen – Richie is looking pretty good.

Some critics regularly dismiss the English director, claiming he makes the same type of film using the same tricks. That isn’t true for Wrath of Man by the way.

In fact, Richie has a strong critical record overall with only one of his 13 films, Swept Away from 2002, universally panned.

Richie’s latest, another American action thriller, is even less like his usual fare, using a straight, linear narrative and conventional directorial style.

Unlike Ritchie’s other films, The Covenant is also inspired by true events, being the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and failure to protect the hundreds of local interpreters it had used during the war who were now at risk of persecution by the Taliban.

It’s March 2018 at the film’s start when an Army Special Operations Unit conducting a routine vehicle check suffers casualties from a truck bomb. Among those killed is the unit’s Afghan interpreter.

Unit Leader Sergeant John Kinley, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, needs a replacement quickly, but there is always the possibility that an interpreter could be an enemy spy. Kinley settles on the experienced but sullen and unfriendly Ahmed Abdullah, played by Iraqi actor Dar Salim, perhaps because Ahmed reminds me a little of himself.

Slowly the men form a bond which is cemented when Ahmed rescues a wounded McKinley who is shipped home. The film then shifts to McKinley’s attempts to find and help Ahmed who is still in Afghanistan.

It’s a well made and well intentioned film that is as much about a bond of friendship as a statement on political expediency.