The Covenant begins on a high note with the viewer served combat long enough for two movies in the first 40 minutes and then takes an elaborate turn to tell an emotional story of brotherhood, commitment, and indebtedness.

The lead actor, John Kinley (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), loses his translator and another team member at the beginning of the story. The process of replacing the translator introduced Ahmed (played by Dar Salim) as the new translator. Ahmed would live up to the references that came before him by being the team member who sticks to his guts rather than orders. While this was a problem at the initial stages, his guts came through a couple through saving other team members and heroically saving John Kinley at last.

On a quest to uncover ammunition-building sites within the Taliban networks, John Kinley and team were frustrated by both bad intel and a mole, two of which Ahmed was able to fish out. With Ahmed’s experience of having lived with them and his grudge of losing his son to the Taliban, the team would take the fight to an abandoned mining site, but they become outnumbered. Everybody but Ahmed and John dies, just before backup could arrive.

The duo escape through the woods with the Taliban chasing closely. While trying to escape a made-out abandoned building they had spent at, John gets shot and was almost taken away until Ahmed reappears and saves them.

Ahmed would make a switch into a hero by choosing not to leave John behind, he would nurse his wounds, and carry him on a makeshift wooden trolley 100 clicks across Taliban territory to safety. A sentence makes light of the ordeal when you consider the Taliban militants he fought off, the disguise he had to perfect to make it through checkpoints, and the demand for his strength.

Just minutes after Taliban militants uncovered their disguise, engages them in a fight and Ahmed wins, US soldiers probably from the close Air Base who must have had the gunshots came to their rescue, taking John away immediately for medical attention but leaving Ahmed behind.

More than a month later, John leaves the hospital to be informed that Ahmed, his wife, and the newly born child had gone into hiding. John would get distraught trying to secure a visa for the three but to no avail. Burdened by the plight of a man who saved his life and is in hiding from the Taliban because of that, John goes back to Afghanistan himself to bring them out.

This suicidal quest launches the viewer into another round of combat. John had gone alone without the help of the mercenaries he had paid to join him, and it wasn’t long before the Taliban made them out. In a bid to redeem their pride, the Taliban sends its might after them and the brawl would climax at a bridge with John, Ahmed, the wife and child, and the driver taking heavy fire. Just when they were out of rounds and one would have at least expected one of them dead, the mercenaries came through raining bullets from the sky and eliminating the Taliban.

Making for an exciting end is that the mercenaries showed up with Visas for Ahmed and the family. But not so exciting is the fate of others who help the US Army at war, for instance, the truck driver who was instrumental to their safety was unaccounted for, or the more than 300 interpreters and their families murdered by the Taliban for working with the US Army. Over 300 interpreters were abandoned.

So there’s a theme of spoken and unspoken obligation, the type a soldier has to his country, the type a soldier has to a fellow soldier, and the type a person owes someone who had helped them. Could he have been labeled terrible if John had moved on with his life, especially after trying to secure the visa and it didn’t work? At least many didn’t see him as such he was about to be decorated while the main hero remained in hiding.

The movie establishes that some human encounters are covenants. Like the Igbo people of Nigeria would say “ife nwoke nyere nwoke ibe ya bu nga jidelu m”, loosely translated to a favor from a man to a another man is loaned, to be paid back later. That was the covenant between Ahmed and John, a sacrifice paid forward that was repaid beautifully. We see John demanding a return of this loan from his boss, Col. Vokes (played by John Miller), whose life he saved 8 years ago, in the form of visas for Ahmed’s family. This is also the covenant between every nation’s military and the locals who help them.

Despite stereotypes would have us believe, not all Afghans are Taliban or Taliban supporters. We see this with Ahmed, but also with the feasting locals who decide to help Ahmed and unconscious John, despite knowing the price on their heads, simply because they hate the Taliban as much.

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant is a brilliant and needed movie, on hand because it quenches the thirst of those who have been long starved of good combat movies in 2023 but also because it takes its time to sell it.

Watch trailer here: