Run Hide Fight: Infidels catches up to leftist Hollywood.
No one in Hollywood dares update the 1985 Red Dawn, John Milius’s cautionary fantasy about a communist scare. After the negligible 2012 remake, it remains a conservative pipe dream — until now, with the provocative makeover Run Hide Fight: Infidels.
Titled after a school-shooting warning promoted by the Department of Homeland Security in 2012, Run Hide Fight: Infidels offers a what-if tale of an American university campus taken over by protesters, covering for Muslim jihadists who slaughter students and faculty. The battle is fought by undergraduate Dev (JC Kilcoyne), the son of a former Delta Force soldier whose partner, military vet Clay Saunders (Jonathan Majors), is dedicated to capturing ISIS mastermind Asad al-Madhi (Alec Rayme). Saunders is visiting the campus to promote his book America Unafraid when the protest/massacre occurs.
Produced by Dallas Sonnier and Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire platform, the film, written and directed by Kyle Rankin, is intended to be incendiary but also somewhat humorous. Deliberately challenging far-left Hollywood conventions, it imitates those methods of suasion — reworking Red Dawn as Red-Green Dawn, evoking the Red-Green Alliance that describes that tactical cooperation between radical leftists (“red”) and Islamists (“green”) that was on display in the recent Columbia University protests. It could also be called Keffiyeh Dawn for the clear, simple, morally black-and-white delineation of good and evil when the terrorists divide students by gender for humiliation and sexual subjugation.
Satirical humor comes from seeing the alternate reality of Laughton University (filmed at Limestone College in South Carolina), an Anywhere college campus where American liberalism is openly self-sacrificial. “I’m a recovering Catholic myself,” says a school administrator who considers American patriotism “too judgy, not coming from a place of love.” This is what Hollywood and mainstream news media won’t show, so the “Silence is compliance,” and “Free, free Palestine!” chants have a Brechtian obviousness.
When Ibrahim (Stephen Hailo), al-Madhi’s son, leads the campus attack that’s meant to “deliver real change to this godforsaken, misbegotten country,” it demonstrates a noteworthy truth about all Hollywood propaganda: You can find actors to do anything. (One quick cut shows a European agent provocateur secretly paid by cash in a yellow envelope.) This includes Dev’s patriotic dormmate P.J. (James Bingham), who gets the film’s cleverest jibe: “Four things more powerful than all things are: women, horses, power, war.” He asks, “Anybody know who said that?” and his clueless classmates guess, “Helen Keller? Hitler?” P.J. quotes Western colonial icon Rudyard Kipling the way conservative cinephiles acknowledge John Milius.
Rankin’s ambush scenes are effective. His propaganda recalls Costa-Gavras’s purpose without rivaling his skill: A pan of dead student bodies strewn across the campus as their cellphones are reactivated with the Muslim call to prayer takes unwary and naïve viewers by surprise and is enough to inspire political fatalism. Later, a self-mocking comic trio that defends the campus isn’t quite up to Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man, but it proves that the Daily Wire’s challenge to Hollywood isn’t entirely self-serious.
Only sleeper-cell reviewers could oppose this freedom-of-speech provocation. (Variety predictably labeled it “trolling . . . deeply Islamophobic.”) But Run Hide Fight: Infidels proves that a counteroffensive is possible (including gaining rights to pop songs by Third Eye Blind, Deep Blue Something, Stone Temple Pilots, and Stereo MCs). Actor Jonathan Majors risks his career to utter Saunders’s gung-ho speech, “There are three ways Islam will conquer the West: through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our own Western freedoms against us.” But Rankin’s strongest ploy shows Ibrahim’s vicious reflex to “nonbinary” and gay protesters: One is hanged from a flagpole wearing a trans LGBTQ banner alongside the ISIS flag. Daily Wire is playing catch-up to left-Hollywood point-making.
