Kyle Rankin’s Run Hide Fight: Infidels is a film that wants to provoke. It wants to offend. What it does not want to do is entertain, and that failure is the whole story.
The setup is simple. Islamist terrorists hijack a college’s pro-Palestine encampment, forcing everyone inside to follow Sharia law. Anyone who steps out of line is marked as an “infidel” and executed. A group of students, a security guard and a Delta Force veteran decide to fight back. The premise is bold, even dangerous. The execution is not.
Trailer, via The Daily Wire.
The Premise
The film’s central idea is a real one. Terrorists seizing a campus to enforce religious law on students is not fiction. Rankin and his co-writer, also Kyle Rankin, could have made a tight, tense thriller out of this. Instead, they chose to make a movie that feels less like a warning and more like a dare.
The problem is not the idea. The problem is the handling. The film spends too much time establishing the rules of its world and not enough time making those rules matter. The villains are cartoonish, the heroes are thin, and the stakes feel more like a homework assignment than a human drama.
The Trolling Question
Variety’s critic called the film “an epic act of trolling.” That reading holds up. The movie is not trying to convince anyone of anything. It is trying to push buttons. Its transgressions are largely artistic instead of political, which is a strange choice for a film built on outrage.
The film is sloppy in ways that feel deliberate. The pacing drags, the action sequences are poorly choreographed, and the dialogue is often cringe-worthy. It is a film that wants to be hated, according to the critic’s view.
The Cast
Jonathan Majors plays Captain Clay Saunders, the Delta Force veteran who leads the resistance. He is the best thing in the film, and he barely gets room to breathe. JC Kilcoyne plays Devlin Shaw, the security guard who joins the fight. Tyler Aser plays Lizzy Dupree, one of the students caught in the middle. Stephen Hailo plays Ibrahim Asad Melod, one of the terrorists. James Bingham plays P.J. Manetti, another student. David Lucas rounds out the cast as Terrence Kirk.
None of these performances are bad. They are just buried under a script that gives them nothing to work with.
What Works
There are moments where the film almost clicks. The tension between the characters is real, and the fear of what happens to someone marked as an infidel is genuinely unsettling. When the film stops talking and starts showing, it has something worth watching. Those moments are rare, and they are quickly drowned out by the film’s own excesses.
More an epic act of trolling than a sincere creative endeavor
That line captures the whole experience. This is not a film with a message. It is a film that wants a reaction. The difference is enormous.
The Verdict
Run Hide Fight: Infidels is a mess. It is a mess that knows it is a mess, which makes it harder to dismiss than it deserves. It is also a mess that is easy to walk away from.
The film’s runtime is 129 minutes. That is a long time to spend with a story that does not know what it wants to be. The genre mix of Action and Thriller suggests a fast, gripping ride. This is not that ride.
The audience score sits at 5.6 out of 10 from five TMDB votes. That number is early, and it is low. It is also fair. A film this thin deserves a low score, and the few people who bothered to vote seem to agree.
The film’s worst sin is not its politics. It is its craft. A filmmaker can be offensive and still be competent. Rankin and his co-writer are neither.
The film is now in cinemas. It will be forgotten by November. That is the fate of films that exist to be talked about, not watched.
- The premise is strong.
- The execution is weak.
- The cast is wasted.
- The troll is visible.
The film is a cautionary tale about ambition without discipline. Rankin and his co-writer had a good idea. They just did not know what to do with it.
Run Hide Fight: Infidels is a failure. It is a failure that is entertaining to watch fail, which is a small comfort.
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