Guy Ritchie's 9/10 Action Thriller Is Officially One of His Best Movies on Streaming

Guy Ritchie has spent decades bouncing between crime capers, spy thrillers, and blockbuster franchises, but one of the filmmaker's most acclaimed movies feels remarkably different from the projects that made him famous. Now, three years after largely flying under the radar at the box office, one of Ritchie's collaborations with Jake Gyllenhaal is giving viewers another chance to discover one of the director's most unexpectedly effective films.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is one of the filmmaker's best-reviewed pictures, and it's now getting a new lease on life streaming on Hulu. In the picture, Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Sergeant John Kinley, an American soldier on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Featuring local interpreters, the film draws on stories and plot threads largely inspired by true events.

What makes Guy Ritchie's The Covenant particularly interesting within his larger filmography is that it tends to abandon the filmmaker's usual bag of tricks. Those looking for Ritchie's typical fast-talking British gangsters or the heightened blockbuster antics seen in Sherlock Holmes won't find much of it here. Instead, Ritchie delivers a surprisingly straightforward war thriller built nearly entirely around the relationship between two men.

Opposite Oscar-nominated Gyllenhaal is Dar Salim as Ahmed Abdullah, one of the Afghan interpreters hired to work alongside Kinley's unit. In the film, the relationship between Kinley and Ahmed starts largely as a business necessity, though everything changes once the group is attacked by the Taliban. Abdullah, a former Taliban fighter who defected, saves Kinley and his squad from certain death. The rest of the film involves Kinley trying to locate Abdullah and his family to save and bring to the United States.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant puts character first

Photo: Christopher Raphael/MGM

That's where Guy Ritchie's The Covenant separates itself from a lot of similarly constructed military thrillers. The action is certainly there, particularly as the story builds toward Kinley's return, but the movie is less interested in creating an unstoppable action hero than it is in exploring the debt one person can feel toward another. It's one of the increasingly rare instances in Hollywood where a filmmaker pushes character depth over narrative originality.

Gyllenhaal plays Kinley with the intensity he's brought to everything from Donnie Darko to Nightcrawler and even Spider-Man: Far From Home, but Salim is every bit his equal.

It's also considerably more restrained than Ritchie's typical action fare. There are firefights, explosions, and the standard military set pieces, but there aren't many winking jokes or elaborate flourishes to remind viewers who's behind the camera. Ritchie largely gets out of the story's way and lets the relationship between Kinley and Ahmed drive the movie forward — and it's wildly more successful because of that. In fact, that's probably why the film carries a 98-percent Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes.

For anyone who skipped Guy Ritchie's The Covenant when it first arrived in theaters in 2023, its latest streaming run on Hulu makes for an easy excuse to catch up. It may not look much like the movies that first made Ritchie famous, but that's what makes it so compelling in the first place.