Promising high-stake action sequences and a gripping human drama, the trailer of Guy Ritchie’s latest offering — The Covenant — follows a former soldier’s return to Afghanistan to track down a local interpreter who saved his life during an ambush by Taliban forces.
Headlined by Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim, the action thriller also features Alexander Ludwig, Antony Starr, Jason Wong, Bobby Schofield, Sean Sagar, Sina Parvaneh and Emily Beecham.
In the two-minute-42-second-long trailer, we are introduced to US sergeant John Kinley (Gyllenhaal), who is posted in war-torn Afghanistan plagued by the Taliban. Here he meets Ahmed (Salim), an Afghan citizen working for the US army as an interpreter.
The trailer further reveals that Ahmed’s son was killed by the Taliban. John gets severely wounded during a Taliban ambush and is saved by Ahmed, who carries him across the Hindu Kush mountains and takes care of his injuries. But this act of kindness along with his association with the US army make Ahmed and his family targets for the Taliban. When John learns that Ahmed and his family were not given safe passage to the US, he must repay his debt by returning to the war zone to retrieve them before the Taliban hunts them down first.
The Covenant joins a long list of war films like The Outpost, 12 Strong and War Machine — all shot amid the bleak landscape of Afghanistan — to depict the two-decade-long War in Afghanistan from the perspective of the US army.
Gyllenhaal previously acted in 2009’s psychological war drama Brothers, which also portrayed the Afghan situation and the presence of the US army. The 42-year-old actor put up a poster of the film on Instagram recently.
The Covenant is written by Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies. Ritchie is known for films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Sherlock Holmes and RocknRolla.
Apart from The Covenant, Ritchie is also gearing up for the release of Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. The 54-year-old filmmaker has a host of projects lined up including the Netflix spin-off series of The Gentlemen, The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Aladdin 2 and Disney’s live-action remake of Hercules.
