Movie Review: 120 minutes of Badly Written, Poorly Acted Poison — “Run, Hide Fight: Infidels”

Some are “canceled” but few truly remain that way in Hollywood.

Kevin Spacey and Armie Hammer aren’t around. But Roseanne Barr is, reduced to ranting into nearly empty convention halls and podcasts of fellow cranks.

But Woody Allen kept working after people finally started believing the child molestation charges against him. Granted, Wallace Shawn was the only “star” happy to be associated with the creep.

Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism didn’t keep him from carving out a solid B-movie career, which is the fate of most action stars in their dotage anyway.

And here’s former Marvel man Jonathan Majors, rendered nearly unemployable after beating his then-girlfriend, “starring” in a thriller so Islamophobic you’d think it was released on Sept. 12, 2001.

Aside from Majors, “Run, Hide Fight: Infidel” has a no-name cast and a whole lot of hate packed into its 120 or so minutes of clumsy, lurching running time.

The latest from those Weenie Riefenstahls at The Daily Wire is an idiotically plotted and scripted terrorism thriller and a “stand alone” sequel to “Run, Hide, Fight” — which had real (B-list) movie stars in it.

It’s about a college campus taken over by terrorists, with assorted “woke” caricatures pitilessly murdered in what are meant to be “You figured it out” epiphanies, but actually here played for laughs among the bigot audience of The Daily Wire.

Consider — a gay college kid is tossed off a roof, tracked screaming all the way to the ground. Another coed wearing a rainbow colored cape is hung from the top of a flag pole.

Journalists are feckless bystanders who also get what the fascist right figures they have coming to them.

The large cadre of Muslims who show up, bearded and unloading duffels and rifle cases, aren’t noticed. We aren’t shown them toting sacks of black hajibs for their hostage/coed “brides” to wear before they’re raped.

Here’s how assorted terrorists are ID’d in the credits — “Pockmark, Scar, Cleft.”

Black characters — students and faculty — are anti protest, anti free speech and anti student, save for the one “security” employee whose girth is a punch line and who follows the younger, dopier Army vet video gamer kid into battle.

And Majors? Why, he’s a Bush era Iraq War veteran plugging a book, “America Unafraid,” accompanied by armed bodyguards onto a college campus because, I guess he saw what happened to Charlie whatisname.

Seven years earlier, Capt. Clay Saunders lost his best buddie in an insurgent hunt in the Middle East. That dead man’s son, Devlin (JC Kilcoyne) is now a student at Virginia’s Laughton University (actually defunct Limestone U. in Gaffney, S.C.), running cross country and crushing on classmate Lizzy (Tyler Aser).

The day Saunders is due to make his speech about “the three ways Islam replaces (Great Replacement Theory without Jews) us,” the college is to hold its student carnival, which is being disrupted by a corps of protesters led by Farrah (Charlotte Delaney Riggs), a shrill anti-Zionist who peppers every sentence with slogans and acronyms despised by the intolerant right.

“ICE out, Gaza IN!”

Devlin’s swaggering, combat vet game-addict roomie PJ (James Bingham) slings slurs at this Egyptian or that Korean on their dorm floor in that wingnutty “He don’t mean nothin'” way.

And then that Syrian refugee who took a custodial job on campus, Ibrahim (Stephen Hailo) and his team unleash explosions, flames and AK-47 fire on the campus, the lecture hall and the student union.

With protests going on and protesters throwing their own smoke grenades, you can see how everybody caught up in this is confused. I mean, that hail of bullets gunning down students all across the quad, should we run, or not?

The vague “demands” of the terrorists, who take hostages after killing scores, and then kill scores more, the involvement of a German-born employee of the bookstore, the non-response by “police” (mocked here) all swirl around a thriller designed to have the track star kid inherit his late daddy’s firearm skills, the vet and a security guard (David Lucas) free students — especially the girl crush — and take back the campus.

Take The Daily Wire release off the opening credits and you still find yourself facing a film where every scene is sloppily scripted and pointlessly progresses past any perceived dramatic of plot-function “payoff.”

The ’90s pop layered onto the soundtrack — Third Eye Blind, “Breakfast at Tiffanies” — is just…off, and there’s no explaining it away.

Writer-director Kyle Rankin’s so worried about “agenda” that his movie is laughably obvious and clumsy in expressing that agenda, and utterly lacking anything recognizably human in the caricatured characters or performances.

And through it all, in his few scenes, Majors looks something between glad-to-have-a-job and embarassed.

Because there are worse things than being “canceled.” Taking the wrong gig to make your “comeback” is one.

Rating: violence, racism, homophobia and profanity

Cast: Jonathan Majors, JC Kilcoyne, Tyler Aser, Stephen Hailo, James Bingham, Charlotte Delaney Riggs, Savannah Leigh James, Chase Ramsey and David Lucas.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kyle Rankin. A Daily Wire release.

Running time:

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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