He may have been reliably churning out new features on a regular basis for over 20 years, but there’s a very strong argument to be made that Guy Ritchie is currently on the hottest streak of his entire career, with The Covenant continuing his impressive penchant and increasing mastery of the action thriller.
It’s even more unexpected when the uptick in quality has coincided with a serious increase in quantity as well, with the Jake Gyllenhaal-fronted war story marking the filmmaker’s fourth release since the beginning of 2020. The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and now The Covenant are all technically set in the same genre space, but each of them feels distinctly different by operating under its own set of rules.
In the case of the latter, it’s a gritty boots on the ground story that finds Gyllenhaal’s soldier taking matters into his own hands to return behind enemy lines in order to reconnect with and extract the interpreter who risked life and limb carrying him through unforgiving enemy terrain, when it would have been a lot simpler to leave him for dead and flee.
A Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 83 percent and a 98 percent user rating makes it the best-reviewed film of Ritchie’s entire career, and yet The Covenant could only score $15 million at the box office on a $50 million budget. Thankfully, though, streaming subscribers haven’t been sleeping on the year’s best actioner that nobody paid to see on the big screen, with FlixPatrol naming the acclaimed and heart-stopping epic as one of the Top 10 titles on Amazon, Google Play, and Vudu in the United States.