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More an epic act of trolling than a sincere creative endeavor, “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” aspires to “own the libs” and antagonize Muslims, but the filmmaking is so shoddy that neither group will likely seek it out,
even to assess whether they should be offended. Written and directed by onetime Hollywood hopeful Kyle Rankin (“The Battle of Shaker Heights”), this standalone sequel to his 2020 film “Run Hide Fight” actively parrots the views of its distributor, right-wing media platform The Daily Wire, with its story of a military veteran battling jihadists on a college campus. Yet its comically reductive treatment of characters, regardless of their partisanship, ensures that the film’s transgressions are largely artistic instead of political, rendering it (mostly) unworthy of the outrage its Islamophobic promotional campaign has thus far attempted to stoke.
Following in the footsteps of “Citizen Vigilante” star and fellow embattled actor Armie Hammer, Jonathan Majors fights personal financial insolvency as Clay Saunders, a Delta Force captain whose fellow soldier gets killed while the two of them are apprehending Isis mastermind Asad al-Madhi (Alec Rayme). Seven years later, Saunders embarks on a tour for his new book “America Unafraid,” which aims to detail “the ways Islam will conquer the west.” He arrives at Laughton University for a promotional appearance on the same day that campus protestors, fueled by the encouragement of a mysterious group of “elite freedom fighters,” decide to take over the student union. What the protestors don’t know is that the freedom fighters are actually Islamic terrorists led by Ibrahim (Stephen Hailo), al-Madhi’s son.
Piggybacking on the scrappy disruption of the protestors, Ibrahim’s well-trained foot soldiers fortify themselves at key positions across campus and begin killing students, faculty and the influx of citizens visiting campus for the school’s fall carnival. Ibrahim’s plan is to establish a new caliphate at Laughton, where he will either convert, “purify” or purge the remainder of the Americans his solders have captured.
Outside the student union, Devlin (JC Kilcoyne), the son of Saunders’ late comrade, decides to take the law into his own hands, albeit primarily to rescue his buddy Kwan (Chris K. Lee), and crush Lizzy (Tyler Aser), who becomes a bargaining chip for Ibrahim after the terrorist discovers that she’s the daughter of a billionaire. Teaming up with Terrence (David Lucas), a quick-witted campus security guard, and his xenophobic roommate P.J. (James Bingham), the heretofore apolitical Devlin attempts both to mount a rescue mission and exact revenge against the school’s violent oppressors, as he begins to learn firsthand about the threats — both existential and violently real — that his late father was fighting to defeat.
Movies have taken aim at “wokeness” at an increasing pace in recent years, but making fun of political correctness is hardly a new concept; “P.C.U.,” which took its namesake when the concept was still freshly being articulated in the mainstream, came out in 1994. Given its nonstop barrage of zeitgeist-pilfering broadsides against progressivism, “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” practically qualifies as the Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer version of such a send-up. (File it alongside “Date Movie” and “Epic Movie” and retitle it “Liberal Movie.”) Every single character arrives on screen with a fully-baked backstory that amplifies their identity with a stereotype — Kwan, a computer whiz; purple-haired campus revolutionary Farrah (Charlotte Delaney Riggs), an “I like everyone” bisexual — and Rankin coaches them to deliver their expository declarations with comically smug entitlement. If only the movie were trying to be funny.
Laughton University (actually South Carolina’s Limestone University, if you were curious what venerated institution would allow this film to be shot on their campus) is paralyzed at every level by self-righteous compassion: George (Jason Gray-Stanford), the school’s dean, is too afraid of appearing discriminatory (much less of endorsing law enforcement) to call in the police, and even local mayor Flores (Shazia Pascal) insists upon efforts to “lower the temperature” at the bloody crime scene rather than making a decisive show of force. When a Black professor suggests that the protesting students are infringing on their classmates’ right to use shared areas, her white counterparts shake their heads in disgust for her refusal to capitulate to progressive groupthink.
Rather than making a satirical point about liberal overreach, the movie argues that all this empathy for other people — including for the Indigenous tribes whose land was seized on behalf of the school, or Palestinians trying to hold onto theirs — is a purely oppressive force. Further, it’s in direct opposition to the uncomplicated, common-sense decisions made by men like Saunders who have faced America’s real enemies.
Unsurprisingly, Rankin’s depiction of Muslims is deeply Islamophobic, although Sue Obeidi, senior vice president for the Muslim Public Affairs Council Hollywood Bureau, has rightly called the film “more ridiculous than it is offensive.” The whole movie is like that — not smart enough to actually explore the viewpoints or value systems of either Muslims or liberals, much less where they come from. Instead, the filmmaker becomes a megaphone for his producer, right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whose debate style tends to involve steamrolling his opponent with strawman arguments and acting surprised when they become exasperated.
P.J., one of the film’s lead characters, is a foul-mouthed gamer who lies about his military record to justify calling his Egyptian classmate a “camel jockey,” but after a passing callout by Devlin for “stolen valor,” his aspirations to heroism are validated when he ruefully defies local authorities, gridlocked by legal and ethical restraint, to help save the day.
Majors appears mostly at the beginning and end of the film, giving a thoroughly disengaged performance. (We’re a long way from the awards buzz that his role in “Magazine Dreams” generated at one point.) Then again, the kind of fearmongering peddled here requires a level of conviction that it’s hard to imagine he possesses. The Daily Wire is a perfect platform for “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” giving it just the right context to set audience expectations. Are you contemptuous of radical leftists who believe that others should be treated with decency, care and respect? If so, this is the film for you. Otherwise, there are dozens of much safer spaces to occupy, whether you’re a bleeding-heart liberal or just a moviegoer with even slightly discriminating tastes.
