‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’ Is A Grotesque Insult To Neocons Across The World

“Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is the latest production from the Daily Wire, but calling it a movie may be giving it more credit than it deserves. The film struggles not only to hold its own, but to clear the exceedingly low bar required to qualify as a movie in the first place.

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The problem with the film isn’t its blatant politicization; in fact, cinema and art in general are often apt conduits for uncomfortable truths, including political messages. The problem lies in its execution; instead of trusting the audience to exercise even the slightest amount of critical thinking or basic comprehension, the filmmakers inject every character, joke, offhand line, and scene with overt political messaging.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with making a movie that believes Islamist terrorism is evil, that American institutions can be cowardly, or that contemporary campus politics can be absurd.

A filmmaker ought to be allowed to believe all of those things, and infuse them into their art. The problem with Run Hide Fight: Infidels is much simpler: It doesn’t trust its audience, not in the slightest.

Every single political point is underlined, every character trait is thoroughly elucidated, every joke is telegraphed, and every ideological conflict comes with its own instruction manual. The movie doesn’t want you to watch and reach a conclusion; it draws the conclusion for the viewer, then makes sure you didn’t miss it the first time by explaining it again and again and again.

By the time the end credits roll, the experience isn’t so much like watching a movie as it is sitting through a two-hour lecture from someone who keeps stopping to ask whether you’re taking notes.

That is especially frustrating because there is a decent action movie buried deep inside Infidels, but instead the filmmakers decided to turn an hour-long monologue by Mark Levin into a movie.

The premise is simple enough. A group of Islamic terrorists wreak havoc on a college campus, and Jonathan Majors’ character, a former Delta Force officer, becomes one of the few people capable of confronting the attackers; that’s a watchable movie, perhaps not the most compelling, but nonetheless watchable. (RELATED: Jonathan Majors’ First Role Since Assault Trial A Stark Difference From Where His Career Left Off)

Run Hide Fight: Infidels fails to meet that metric.

Instead, the film seems terrified that the audience might watch a terrorist murder someone and fail to understand that terrorism is bad, so they explain it tediously. Then they explain the politics surrounding it. And then the politics surrounding the politics.

I don’t particularly care that the film is conservative; in fact, some of the best cinema has strong political undertones, but that’s just it: they’re undertones left for the viewer to dissect and interpret.

I also don’t think the movie’s biggest problem is that its politics are too aggressive. If anything, the film’s political worldview could have made for a fascinating thriller.

Imagine a movie that featured a university administration facing an impossible crisis, students who have spent months screaming political slogans suddenly confronted with actual violence, and characters discovering that the ideology they thought was theoretical has real-world consequences.

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You wouldn’t need a character to turn toward the camera and explain any of it.

The audience has eyes.

That’s the part the movie doesn’t seem to understand.

There is a stark difference between having something to say and having confidence in what you’ve said. A confident filmmaker knows that if they put an idea on screen, the audience will wrestle with it and reach a conclusion, trusting that, despite the nuance or ambiguity of certain aspects, the viewer will eventually arrive at the same conclusion as the filmmaker.

An insecure filmmaker presents an idea and then puts an under-explained character with vague motivations but clear political beliefs on screen to explain it.

Run Hide Fight: Infidels is an extremely insecure film.

It wants to be provocative, but it doesn’t seem to trust provocation itself. It keeps reaching back through the screen to make sure the audience received the message.

All in all, the result is a surprisingly patronizing movie.

The irony is that the film seems to be attacking the very kind of intellectual conformity that it practices itself. It spends most of the film mocking people for being incapable of independent thought, while simultaneously refusing to allow its own audience to think independently.

Not to mention the characters, which feel like talking points picked out of a Fox News segment on Abdul El-Sayed wearing costumes.

The activist is there to represent activism.

The administrator is there to represent the proliferation of leftist thought in American higher education.

The terrorist is there to represent radical Islam.

The soldier is there to represent strength and resolve.

And the jokes serve to convey the filmmakers’ disdain for campus culture.

Once the formulaic approach to their filmmaking is recognized, there isn’t any substance left to hold the movie together.

The movie becomes predictable not because you can guess the plot, but because you can guess what the producers want every scene to mean.

It feels like a checklist of the Republican Party’s midterm messaging, radical Islamism — check, woke college students — check, zionist talking points — check, and on and on.

That’s a much worse problem.

And that is the tragedy of Run Hide Fight: Infidels: it didn’t need to be less political; it needed to stave off some of that incessant desperation to prove it was political.

Instead, Ben Shapiro reaches through the screen and grabs you by the shoulders, shakes you, and asks, “Did you get it?”

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Yes.

We all got it the first time.