‘Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant’ Review: The Director Gets Serious — and Ups His Game — in a Stirring Afghanistan War Drama Starring Jake Gyllenhaal

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Karl Urban is in final talks to star as fan-favorite character “Johnny Cage” in the sequel to New Line’s hit 2021 action adventure “Mortal Kombat” based on the blockbuster video-game franchise.Simon McQuoid, who directed the 2021 film, is set to return. Jeremy Slater (“Moon Knight,” “The Umbrella Academy”) wrote the screenplay for the sequel.The previous film was a new adaptation of the popular video-game franchise that offered a grittier, more violent take on the material than the 1990s films.

according to IMDB’s Box Office Mojo.Since its opening on April 5, it has earned over $400 million nationwide, the second-fastest animated film to reach those numbers after “The Incredibles 2,” according to Deadline. The supernatural horror movie “Evil Dead Rise,” the fifth installment of the “Evil Dead” series, came in second, with a $10.3-million take on its opening day.The Post called the film “gory-as-hell” and said it is “as campy and fun as any chapter in producer Sam Raimi’s four-decade-old horror series.”“The Covenant,” the story of an army sergeant in Afghanistan, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and an Afghani interpreter, played by Danish actor Dar Salim, landed in third, with $2.25 million in sales.

Guy Ritchie is opening up about his new movie, The Covenant, and revealed that they didn’t use real firearms for any scenes.

Decades after he first broke out with “Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels,” film fans probably think they know what a Guy Ritchie film is going to look and feel like. Well, when you bring Jake Gyllenhaal into the equation, Ritchie throws all of those preconceived notions out of the window, and you end up with “The Covenant,” a no-nonsense war film about a life-altering debt and the lengths someone will go to shed a curse, of sorts.

Guy Ritchie‘s new movie The Covenant is now in theaters and it’s getting some great reviews!

EXCLUSIVE: In Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, Jake Gyllenhaal throws on the military fatigues he hasn’t worn since 2005’s Jarhead, this time joined by an award-winning actor and real-life veteran in Dar Salim. In the new action movie from Miramax and MGM, Gyllenhaal plays U.S. Army Master Sgt. John Kinley, whose bond with his interpreter, Ahmed (Salim), only grows after their unit is ambushed by the Taliban. After Kinley is injured during the escape, Ahmed embarks on a Herculean effort to carry Kinley across the Afghanistan mountains to safety. When Ahmed is unable to get a visa to get him and his family to the U.S., Kinley risks his life to return to Afghanistan and save him.

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Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The romantic action comedy has always had a breathlessly eager-to-please, overstuffed quality. You might say it’s a what’s-not-to-like genre. We laugh! With pulses racing! And swoon at the moonstruck chemistry! In a superior rom-act-com, like “Romancing the Stone” or “Out of Sight” or “True Lies” or the new “Murder Mystery” sequel, the action is the romance — it’s how the characters connect. (One way the form extends vintage Hollywood screwball is that it tends to be about couples who so dislike each other that only by joining in death-defying scrapes can they melt the ice.) But then there are movies like “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” where the love gets sandwiched between vehicular mayhem so aggressive it’s played for “laughs,” and the too-muchness of the whole thing becomes like one of those fast-food fusion experiments. Sorry, but the movie escapism equivalent of a burger topped with a quesadilla served with cheese fries is not my idea of a good time.  

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Guy Ritchie announced in a new interview with Newsweek that he is no longer using real guns on his film sets following the October 2021 “Rust” shooting, in which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed by a prop gun filled with real bullets. Ritchie is a veteran of the action movie genre, with the majority of his films prominently featuring firearms and bombastic shootouts. His latest directorial effort, “The Covenant,” was filmed with Airsoft pellet weapons in place of real guns. “The Covenant” stars Jake Gyllenhaal as U.S. Army sergeant John Kinley, who returns to Afghanistan in an effort to rescue an interpreter named Ahmed (Dar Salim) from the Taliban. The two men became close years earlier when Ahmed served as John’s interpreter during the height of the War in Agahnistan. Ahmed saved John’s live during the war, so John sets out on a mission to do the same. Suffice to say, guns and shootouts are a plenty in the film.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Nicholas Hoult confirmed in a recent interview with The Guardian that he lost out on roles in “The Batman,” “Mission: Impossible 7” and “Top Gun: Maverick” all in a row. In a new interview with GQ España, the actor stressed that he is “happy” with his career despite these “disappointments.” Hoult also went into a bit more detail about the experience of losing the title role in “The Batman” to Robert Pattinson. “Of course,” Hoult said when asked if he would’ve liked to play Bruce Wayne/Batman. “I’m sure if you ask most people, they’ll tell you they’d want to portray that role. I think Matt Reeves’ ideas were fantastic and he made a brilliant movie. And I also think that Rob [Robert Pattinson] did an amazing job with the character and I loved seeing him in it. So I don’t think I would have done as good a job as him ultimately. I don’t think I could have fit as well into the world that Matt created as Rob did.”

If one were paying close attention to the recent career of actor Jake Gyllenhaal one might think he was on a mad quest to a) become a buff action star thriller and b) elevate the careers of mid/middling directors. The last three live-action Gyllenhaal movies –“Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “The Guilty,” and “Ambulance”—have all seemed like an attempt to subvert his narrative as arthouse darling, and the latter two were the best films of those director’s careers in quite some time (Antoine Fuqua and Michael Bay, respectively).

Matthew McConaughey smoking a joint in Guy Ritchie’s new movie “The Covenant.” The prolific British director has, for the moment, left behind quirky crime and comedy for his Afghanistan War film — and it’s not hard to understand why. The story the movie is based on is a harrowing and special one. A US Army sergeant and an Afghan interpreter are on the run from the Taliban, when the American is knocked unconscious and his companion must go to extraordinary lengths to save him.Running time: 125 minutes.

Decades after he first broke out with “Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels,” film fans probably think they know what a Guy Ritchie film is going to look and feel like. Well, when you bring Jake Gyllenhaal into the equation, Ritchie throws all of those preconceived notions out of the window, and you end up with “The Covenant,” a no-nonsense war film about a life-altering debt and the lengths someone will go to shed a curse, of sorts.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” will rule again in its third weekend at the box office. In maintaining the No. 1 spot in North America, the family film is expected to take down two newcomers, the supernatural horror sequel “Evil Dead Rise” and action-war thriller “Guy Ritchie’s the Covenant,” as well as A24’s mind-bender “Beau Is Afraid,” which is expanding nationwide. Universal and Illumination’s animated “Mario” adventure has grossed $366.3 million domestically to date. In the next few days, it will surpass “Minions: The Rise of Gru” ($369 million) as the highest-grossing animated film of the pandemic era. With $724 million globally, it already stands as the biggest movie of the year so far. Now in its third outing at the domestic box office, “Mario” is looking to bring in roughly $45 to $50 million, a massive result at this point in its theatrical run.

I’m not sure why director Guy Ritchie has his name in the title of his latest film, but because this is I think the best Ritchie movie I have seen, I will pass up the chance to snark at the only misstep in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. It about as exciting, gripping and moving as war films get — especially one set in the murky Afghanistan conflict in which the U.S. found itself immersed for more than two decades.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who premiered his new war thriller "The Covenant" this week, said he is drawn to stories about the military because of the "pride and love" that people who "defend our country" exhibit.  "At the beginning of my career, I played a Marine, a recruit, and I got to know a lot of people in the military and learned from them," the "Jarhead" actor told The Associated Press. "And I think it changed my perspective on the world sort of just being around and touching that world a bit."  In the film, which comes out on Friday, Gyllenhaal plays an Army Special Forces sergeant who is rescued by a local interpreter he recruited.  When Gyllenhaal’s character returns to the U.S.

Jake Gyllenhaal knows all about those «Jacked Gyllenhaal» memes. The actor — who is currently in intense UFC training for the upcoming remake — recently sat down with ET's Cassie DiLaura to discuss his new film,, and weigh in on the internet's unquenchable thirst for his movie muscles.«That's a wonderful nickname,» he joked. «It's been an incredible experience and it is [amazing] working with actual real fighters, working with the UFC, reimagining a classic. There's been a lot of the physical [work].»That's not to say that filming was a walk in the park.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Jake Gyllenhaal is determined to star in another Broadway musical. “There are so many musicals I love so deeply,” Gyllenhaal, who starred in a revival of “Sunday in the Park With George” with Annaleigh Ashford in 2017, told Variety at the Los Angeles premiere of his new action drama “The Covenant” on Monday evening. “At some point, I’ve always loved ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ I’d love to do that.” Gyllenhaal’s godmother, Jamie Lee Curtis, was at “The Covenant” premiere and recalled how the actor was supposed to star as Tevye in a school production of “Fiddler” when he was a high school senior. He left the show when he was offered the lead in the 1999 drama “October Sky.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Benita (Julia Mayorga), the young woman at the center of “Rare Objects,” the third feature directed by Katie Holmes, has been through a transformative trauma. In the film’s opening moments, she’s discharged from a mental ward, where she’s been dealing with PTSD; a series of charged flashbacks show us what happened to her. In Manhattan, where she was a university student majoring in economics, she was approached at a bar by a seemingly nice guy, who had a drink with her, and when she went to the restroom he attacked her, shoving her inside and sexually assaulting her. She emerges from this crime a shell of her former self, and Holmes shoots the rape so that we experience how the shock and horror of it could undermine someone’s identity. Benita, out of the hospital, shows up at the home of her doting but quietly stern mother (Saundra Santiago) in Astoria, telling her that she’s taking a break from school; she says nothing at all about what happened to her. She’ll continue to say nothing — to anyone. As she steps back out into the world, hunting for a job, Julia Mayorga acts with a tentative fretful wariness that speaks to the trauma Benita won’t say out loud, and we assume that the movie is going to be about how she confronts that crisis.

Guy Ritchie is reportedly being sued by a writer who claims The Gentleman copied scenes from a script he wrote.According to a report from Variety, Ritchie is at the heart of a lawsuit which was filed in the London High Court last month by actor and writer Mickey De Hara. In his suit De Hara claims that Ritchie commissioned him to write a sequel to the 2008 gangster movie RockNRolla, which was to be based on De Hara’s “personal life experiences”.De Hara goes on to claim that he delivered a script but alleges Ritchie told him “the time of the gangster movie was over”.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If Lars von Trier hadn’t grown top-heavy with the mythology of his self-importance (I’d say that happened around the time of “Antichrist,” in 2009), he might have tossed off a movie like “Sick of Myself” — a social satire in the form of a queasy drama of body horror, and a movie whose disturbing bad-boy tastelessness recalls Von Trier’s “The Idiots,” with a touch of David Cronenberg. This is the second feature by Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director whose first film, “Drib” (2017), was a send-up of the marketing industry, and in a way the new movie is about marketing too. This one, though, takes a viscerally upsetting look at just how far an individual will go to gain attention in the new era of social-media addiction.

K.J. Yossman Guy Ritchie is being sued over his film “The Gentlemen,” which starred Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam and Michelle Dockery. The lawsuit, which was filed in the London High Court last month by actor and writer Mickey De Hara, claims that Ritchie commissioned De Hara to write a sequel to the 2008 gangster movie “RockNRolla” based on De Hara’s “personal life experiences.” (According to British newspaper reports, De Hara was once convicted of possessing cocaine and cannabis “with an intent to supply,” for which he faced jail time). But in 2018, after De Hara delivered the screenplay about a protagonist who runs a marijuana business., Ritchie told him “the time of the gangster movie was over,” intimating the project was no longer in development.

Guy Ritchie is being sued by a former collaborator who claims that his 2020 movie The Gentlemen lifts heavily from one of his screenplays.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sweetwater” is a biopic about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the Black power forward who broke the color barrier of the NBA in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson accomplished the same feat in baseball. It’s telling that Robinson remains one of the most celebrated heroes in sports history, while Clifton is still a somewhat obscure figure. (He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, but still.) There’s a biting irony to that contrast. It relates to how the integration of basketball totally changed the game (the way it was played, the way the fans thought of it), even more than the integration of baseball changed baseball. “Sweetwater,” written and directed by Martin Guigui, is a straight-down-the-middle inspirational sports movie — and, one regrets to say, a kind of benign sketchbook version of the form. Yet it also tells the tale (or, at least, one slice of it) of the Harlem Globetrotters, the fabled team of barnstorming trickster prodigies who Clifton started off as a member of. There were several levels to the Globetrotters’ athletic magic, and the film captures how intricately tied it was to the way that Black players remade the game.