When the great conservative website The Daily Wire expanded into film production five years ago, I cheered. My own traditional fiction writing had become politically incorrect for about a decade, due to such suddenly undesirable elements as strong masculine heroes, sexy women, romance, patriotism, foreign villains, and leftist fanatics. My first article for American Spectator in 2018 posited why a blockbuster action film like Taken would never be made by Hollywood just 10 years later. And things only got worse after that.
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But here was The Daily Wire, promising to make the right kind of pictures and serve the audience that Hollywood snubbed. The much lower budget wasn’t a problem. There were enough good conservative writers like me to tell appealing stories without destroying Metropolis, and absent the “strong” women dulling every mainstream movie. The top DW producer even pushed for a film version of my Great American Novel, Paper Tigers, project ultimately nixed.
Then the movies started coming out — every one of them girlboss-driven. They were, in order: Run, Hide, Fight, about a high-school girl going John McClane to stop a high-school takeover and massacre. Shut In, about a young mother trying to escape a sealed house and killer with her two children. Terror on the Prairie, a Western starring the fabulous Gina Carano, fresh off her Disney cancellation, as a frontier wife fending off brutal outlaws. There was nothing wrong with these pictures; in fact, all were well made, but they were no different from standard Hollywoke fare, only minus the A-List stars and budget.
That disappointment was totally erased and then some this week with the debut of a picture so anti-woke and enjoyable that Hollywood media is already freaking out. ‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’ Review: Jonathan Majors Scrapes the Barrel in This Islamophobic Drivel blared the Variety headline before proceeding to desperately and ignorantly trash the movie. Here’s my correct review.
Run Hide Fight: Infidels is the most fun conservative fiction movie of the decade.
Run Hide Fight: Infidels is the most fun conservative fiction movie of the decade. Not the best, which may be The Sound of Freedom, but a thoroughly enjoyable — though quite brutal — action romp from start to end. Writer-director Kyle Rankin’s far superior sequel to his somber 2020 Run Hide Fight delivers the perfect update on John Milius’s classic Red Dawn, with college boys counterattacking unabashedly repulsive Muslim terrorists who have seized their university. (RELATED: Hollywoke’s War on Heroes)
Variety and the rest of the progressive watchdogs can cry “Islamophobia” as often as Democrats do “racism,” but everything Rankin depicts is accurate Islamic belief, words, and practice. Which were dramatically occluded even right after 9/11 by G.W. Bush’s still current — as of last week — blather about Islam as “a religion of peace.” He couldn’t check that with the at least 15,000 Iranian protesters massacred by the Islamic regime, not to mention the nearly 3,000 U.S. dead from that day.
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While mocking this nonsense, Rankin also hits faculty and student liberals as the Useful Idiots they are. In a clever spin, the Muslim terrorists in his film use a pro-Gaza student protest as cover for their campus slaughter and takeover. When on a rooftop, one of the protesters tells terrorist leader Ibrahim that he’s gay, Ibrahim kicks him off the roof to his splattering death, just like in numerous ISIS videos displaying the same solution to the “homosexual problem.” Full respect goes to actor Stephen Hailo both for his superb performance as Ibrahim, and his courage in portraying unbound evil regardless of the racial factor.
If the movie had been a preachy or transparent sermonette like so much mainstream fare — for example, One Battle After Another — it would have been just as insufferable. But Rankin introduces a group of likable characters with not a girlboss in sight. Pre-assault, the three lead college boys just want to satisfy their crushes on individual pretty coeds like normal young males — a forbidden wish in every studio picture resentful of the Male Gaze. Just ask Sidney Sweeney about feminist outrage. (RELATED: Sydney Sweeney Is Setting Women’s Sports Back, But Not How You Think)
The three friends are impressively played by J.C. Kilcoyne as Devlin, an athlete who decides to stay to save his girlfriend and the hostage students rather than run; James Bingham, a military veteran and gamer whose Rambo-like rants are funny if maybe not genuine; and Chris K. Lee as Kwan, a Korean computer expert (“I’m Asian,” he says to explain his PC proficiency). They get fine help from Jonathan Majors as the war-buddy friend of Devlin’s KIA father, and David Lucas as Terrence, the Reginald VelJohnson-type security guard. The fact that both men are black is totally incidental, unlike every racially bitter black character on large or small screen (see the almost self-parodic Lanterns). The two men play heroes, one seriously, one amusingly.
The beautiful female leads are realistically, believably strong, not physically. Kilcoyne’s new girlfriend, Lizzy, is a Christian who refuses under threat of death to videotape a message hailing Islam as the true faith. Savanna Leigh James scores as a brave journalism major who goes into harm’s way to get the story. And Charlotte Delaney Riggs well plays a protest leader who realizes too late the horror of the side she’d been advocating for.
None of the women ever try to fight the terrorists, leaving the heroics to the men. In fact, they can only watch in fear as Ibrahim molests a beautiful blonde in gym shorts by pointing out the lewdness of her body. And when they’re individually rescued, they reward their heroes with a grateful, passionate kiss. Forget a Disney contract for these fine actresses in the near future. But the audience will appreciate them and the movie.
Side note: Help reverse the decline in fiction reading with a good novel. Check out my fun political-thriller mystery series. Book one, The Washington Trail, was republished last week. Book two, The Camelot Trail, comes out November 17th. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, fine bookstores, and my website.
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