I do not have a Daily Wire subscription, so I miss their movie productions. A friend of mine hosted a group viewing of the conservative media company’s latest movie Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel (RHFI), so that I could see what all the fuss was about.
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After watching most of it, I have no intention of subscribing.
To their credit, conservative companies are yearning to break into the mainstream entertainment marketplace. Rather than complaining, they are pushing back on the left-wing cultural rot defining American media.
Unfortunately, the Daily Wire’s latest feature fails. It’s contrived glorying in empty right-wing stereotypes about left-wing agitators, activists, and angry protesters without offering meaningful characters or a believable story. In short, it was not entertaining, and I am a conservative who respects The Daily Wire’s media vision.
Before excoriating RHFI in detail, allow me to provide a summary of the movie:
The movie starts with American soldiers staking out a terrorist cell in Somalia. One of the soldiers rushes into the terrorist hideout because he sees a child, but he misses the Islamic militant in the background, and the militant murders the soldier.
Fast-forward seven years, and the soldier who survives the combat scene is now a spokesman and author warning the West about Islam, and he speaks at a university in Loudoun County as part of his book tour.
In two other plot threads that take place at the same time, a college student falls in love with the girl in one of his college classes. He invites her to a drinking party in his dorm.
As the budding love interest opens up, we witness an Islamic terrorist, presenting himself as a mere refugee looking for a new life in America, infiltrating the same university as a recent hire. This one terrorist has networked with the left-wing activists on campus (although the batty left-wingers don’t know that his final aim is an Islamic caliphate by force).
The young college undergrad chasing the girl was the most interesting part of the movie. That initial story arc presents the audience with real people attempting to form a real relationship. The roommates were funny too because they engage in real dialogue in a natural situation.
In contrast, however, the Islamic militants are crass stereotypes, so laughably unbelievable that they insult the audience and diminish the larger message that left-wing universities are useful idiots for terrorism, pandering to Islamist and militant left-wing protesters. When the terrorist attack occurs, the mass slaughters are vivid and disturbing, but the nonchalant manner of some of the surviving characters does not come off as credible. They almost act like they’re playing in a video game instead of fighting to survive in a high-stakes violent scenario.
At the 1-hour-and-20-minute mark of the movie (which was as long as I could stand watching the movie before tuning out), a former combat veteran suffering from PTSD takes a central role. Earlier in the movie, he spouts off bigoted remarks about Arabs and Islam, but suddenly he shakes off his military jitters and preps for war. Huh? Also, for a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he looks surprisingly—and thus incredibly—young for a college student!
The movie doesn’t even have a focused tone. From the outset to the Islamic terrorists launching their plot—complete with mass shootings—the film takes on a serious and bloody tone. As the movie progresses, there are blatant attempts at humor where the dialogue isn’t funny, and the movie becomes unwatchable.
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When writing a movie review, you should watch the whole thing. I decided to take the movie title literally. I ran and hid, and I fought the urge to be polite and watch the whole thing. Siskel and Ebert said it’s OK to walk out before a movie ends as long as you admit it, so there.
RHFI’s set design was good, the premise is worthwhile, and the actors have potential (even though none of them are big names). However, none of it comes together to make it worth watching.
I don’t fault The Daily Wire for trying. Conservatives should produce alternative media, especially for movie theaters and television. You can pursue and promote meaningful themes with a political message, but the work must entertain as well as instruct. If it’s a blatant message of “college administrators bad, Islam bad, college students wake up to bad, fight the bad to do good,” the whole thing comes off as hollow and unengaging.
Conservatives have to focus on larger messages without the politics.
Or should their movies be more overtly conservative? One great underrated conservative movie is An American Carol (2008). Created by David Zucker of Airplane! and Naked Gun fame, the movie is a brilliant pro-American parody of Charles Dickens’ Yuletide tale. The main character, Michael Malone (a lampoon of the insufferable Michael Moore), hates America and the Fourth of July. To break him out of his left-wing moral torpor, three ghosts of American history visit him and teach him to revere Independence Day and respect everything great about America.
Yes, the movie pushed clearly conservative talking points, but the movie wasn’t pretending to be neutral entertainment. In fact, the parody aspect, including a lot of great puns and slapstick, mocks itself in a self-referential fashion, much like the other Zucker comedies. The movie played in mainstream theaters, too … and it bombed, sadly.
Conservatives can’t catch a break!
If conservatives want to impact the culture and push meaningful, life-enhancing content, including entertainment, they need to explicitly avoid being political. They should learn from J.R.R. Tolkien’s incredible series The Lord of the Rings. The epic is saturated with Christian ideology and symbolism, but nothing overt. The final movie in the franchise was one of the most rewarding and enriching stories out there, and it won all the Academy Awards for which it was nominated in 2004. Granted, Frodo and Samwise don’t tell the audience to vote Republican, but the refreshing eternal themes resonated with audiences then and now. These kinds of culture-enhancing experiences may encourage audiences to embrace conservative values without explicitly telling them to do so.
Politics is downwind from culture, but culture seeking to be political overshadows its cultural impact and undermines the political message. Turning something cultural into something political is just further downwind from politics, and people will be turned off by it.
Conservatives have done well at sharing the ideas through podcasts, radio talk shows, and articles. Fox News is still one of the highest-rated television stations, and it has an inevitably conservative bent because it allows both sides to be heard, and the conservative side reflects truth, reality, and common sense, while the liberal side tells the public how the world should work, and viewers had better agree or else!
For entertainment to endure, it has to touch us in our hearts as well as our minds, and it has to move us with truthful, accurate portrayals of events and characters with a believable story that will engage us.
Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel does none of those things. If you’re going to do conservative entertainment, you need to focus on conserving eternal and transcendent values and themes rather than pushing right-wing talking points under the guise of telling a story.
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