123 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
An American special forces sergeant in Afghanistan owes his life to the local interpreter who dragged his unconscious body across hostile terrain. When the war moves on and the promised visas never come, that debt becomes a one-man rescue mission. Guy Ritchie drops the wisecracks and finds a pulse.
Master Sergeant John Kinley runs a unit hunting Taliban bomb factories in Afghanistan. He hires Ahmed, a local interpreter with his own reasons for fighting and his own ideas about how to do the job. An ambush wipes out the unit and leaves Kinley wounded and stranded. Ahmed carries him for days across enemy country to get him home. The film is about the debt that creates and the bureaucratic betrayal that follows, when the visas owed to interpreters who served alongside Americans never arrive and the men who risked everything get left to die.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Kinley as a professional who treats Ahmed as an asset until the asset saves his life. The shift in him happens slowly and Gyllenhaal lets it cost something. The guilt eats him from the inside and he plays it as a physical sickness. Dar Salim plays Ahmed as the smarter man in every room, watchful and proud, refusing to perform gratitude for the soldiers who outrank him. Salim builds the relationship through restraint rather than speeches. The bond between the two men carries the entire film and both actors trust silence to do the work.
Guy Ritchie directs from a script he wrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies. He strips out the rapid-fire banter and fractured timelines that define his crime pictures and shoots this straight. The action sequences favor geography and patience over chaos. You always know where the men are and how far they have to go. Christopher Benstead’s score holds back during the long survival stretch and lets the landscape and the labored breathing fill the space. The restraint is the point. Ritchie wants you to feel the distance Ahmed drags Kinley across.
The film works because it refuses to flatter the institution it indicts. The American military uses these men and then abandons the paperwork that would keep them alive. Kinley’s rescue mission is not heroism. It is one man trying to settle a debt his own government walked away from. Ritchie builds a lean survival thriller around that moral failure and resists the urge to dress it up. The result is the most grounded thing he has made.