Gerard Butler knows a thing or two about the “twin films” phenomenon, with the actor emerging victorious a decade ago when Olympus Has Fallen handily defeated White House Down, launching a franchise in the process. Unfortunately, lightning didn’t strike twice after Kandahar ended up being blown out of the water by its accidental contemporary.
When it comes to naming the best movie to release so far this year that revolves around a recognizable star mounting a daring and action-packed mission to extract an Afghan translator from behind enemy lines and escort them to safety, the answer is clearly Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.
The Jake Gyllenhaal- fronted thriller secured the filmmaker a career-best Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 83 percent, not to mention an bananas 98 percent user average. Kandahar, meanwhile, could only rustle up a 45 percent score from critics, although audiences did deem it worthy of a substantially better 82 percent.
Neither of them had a box office run to write home about, but The Covenant‘s $21.8 million still trounced Kandahar‘s $7.3 million, although it should be noted that they weren’t playing on the big screen all over the world. There always has to be a victor, and in this case, it most certainly wasn’t the grizzled Scotsman’s latest foray into his genre of choice.
That being said, Kandahar is currently the number one most-watched movie on Prime Video in the United Kingdom (per FlixPatrol) as part of its surge up the platform’s worldwide charts, so at least people are finally getting around to watching it.