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: Infidels (RHFI),
so that I could see what all the fuss was about.
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, empty, 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 media vision.
Before excoriating RHFI film 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 later, 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 Loudon 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
At the same time as a budding love interest opens up, we
witness one 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 of “Left-wing universities are useful idiots for
terrorism, pandering to Islamic 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 one-hour-and-20-minute mark of the movie (which was
as long as I could stand 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.
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,
released in 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. One of the most rewarding
and enriching stories out there, the final movie in the franchise won all the
Academy Awards that it was nominated for 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 cultural enhancing
experiences may
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 sharing the ideas through
podcasts, radio talk shows, and articles. Fox News is still one of the highest-rated
television stations, and they have an inevitably conservative bent because they
allow 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 they 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: Infidels 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.
