Behold the new and improved Jonathan Majors: paragon of hypermasculinity, the Denzel Washington of the Daily Wire, a Delta Force veteran forced back into action when his war on terror follows him onto home soil. Against all odds, he has tracked his way back to the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed analogue who killed his partner as the Americans were debating whether to bring the criminal mastermind to justice or execute him on the spot. Our Fox News jihadi has no doubt Captain Saunders will respect the letter of the law again.
A bullet cuts him down mid-monologue, and the camera pushes in as Captain Saunders lowers his semi-automatic rifle. You can just imagine that scene, in an alternate reality where conservative crackpottery is gospel, furnishing the Oscar-reel clip for Run Hide Fight: Infidels – a Hollywood treatment for far-right fear-mongering that Majors has latched onto like a piece of Titanic driftwood. The latest release from Ben Shapiro’s Nashville-based streaming studio, intended as a bulwark against the wider film industry’s ostensibly liberal biases, Run Hide Fight: Infidels follows writer-director Kyle Rankin’s 2020 Daily Wire debut Run Hide Fight.
Where the original film had a white teenage waif (1883’s Isabel May) fighting her way out of a high school shooting, this one thrusts Captain Saunders into an Islamist mass-casualty attack on a college campus. And if the sequel registers, who knows? A Sandy Hook-meets-Kindergarten Cop green light can’t be far behind.
Co-produced with Bonfire Legend, another macho studio headquartered in Austin, Infidels is not offered up as fodder for interpretation. The film made its intended message clear from the very first trailer, conflating fictional clips with actual footage of the 9/11 attacks, pro-Palestine protests and Fox News personalities, before revealing an IS flag flying over a college campus as the Islamic call echoed with doom. Then there was the tagline: “Coming soon … or already here?” Talk about twirling the mustache.
The reactions were as polarized as you would expect, with mainstream filmgoers and critics deriding the premise as xenophobic and Islamophobic, while rightwing commentators in the media and online cheered the brazen political incorrectness. We don’t have that fear.” The entertainment proposition with Infidels lies in how deeply it can offend the snowflakes. The 128-minute feature, which took me three tries to finish, plays like a PragerU student film.
The characters aren’t so much colorful as they are drawn in crayon: the campus HR who’s dazzled by the mysterious terrorist sleeper cell in her midst, the spineless university president whose failure to crack down on student protests makes his campus vulnerable. Only the pregnant college professor, who just a few scenes earlier was urging the president to crack heads, stands out as totally incidental to this batshit story. Meanwhile, the oafish Black campus security guard could be a last line of defense if he weren’t so lazy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
