Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant: A Double Dose of Heroism!

This will be a very short review, since I can't say much about the plot without spoiling the movie for you.  The film takes place in Afghanistan in 2018.  The USA has been there for about 20 years, unsuccessfully fighting the Taliban.  We have spent billions of dollars on the war so far, all to no avail.  The Army hired thousands of Afghani translators to help them root out the Taliban.  Working with the USA places these translators at great risk because the Taliban vows to kill them and their families if they are captured.  In exchange for their assistance, the translators and their families were promised visas to enable them to live in the USA after they have completed their missions. Sergeant John Kinley (Gyllenhaal) hires an Afghan translator, Ahmed (Dar Salim).  Sergeant Kinley's small band is given the mission to find locations where the Taliban stores arms, wipe the Taliban located there out, and then bring the arms back to Bagram Air Base, where they are stationed.  Suffice it to say, everything does not go as planned.  During the mission and afterwards, Ahmed and John both perform exceptionally heroic acts, each in the service of the other. The movie gives one an up-close-and-personal sense of what the war in Afghanistan was like, especially how the Taliban operated.  The U.S. armed services left Afghanistan in 2020 and the Taliban then took control of the entire country after only about one month.  The USA never honored our visa agreements with the translators, and many since then have been killed (along with their families) or are still in hiding.  (We abandoned the South Vietnamese in the same shameful way.) The movie is about 15 minutes too long, but it's a story that needs to be told.  It's based on a combination of incidents, and the two leads are a composite of what happened to some of the operators while over there.  I enjoyed the film and found it interesting and suspenseful, and I really liked the cinematography (by Ed Wild).  "The Covenant" sheds light on the fact that heroism, even in wartime, still comes in many forms.