You guys.
You guys.
I love bad movies, okay? I grew up watching MST3K. I watch terrible Lifetime movies on the regular. I can sit through all kinds of schlock. I mean, I’ve seen literally every movie in the entire Bring it On franchise, and there are way more of those than you think there are (it was an especially lazy sick day). So when I tell you that the Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight: Infidels was one of the most torturous things I’ve ever sat through? It really means something. I don’t even know why I did it, because it cost me $15 and there are at least five other “I watched it so you don’t have to” things out there by now, but I guess I was curious about how terrible it could possibly be.
And the answer is: really, really, really terrible. Not even just politically (though it is deeply stupid politically), but there are so many plot holes, so many poorly explained characters, so many things that just make no sense whatsoever, so many very awkward attempts at iconic one-liners … to the point where I almost felt bad for everyone involved in the making of this garbage fire. Because there really is something tragic about the fact that so many of these Daily Wire losers are people who have convinced themselves that the only reason they didn’t make it big in Hollywood is that Hollywood is too liberal, that they’ve spent so long complaining about how what actually does get produced is bad because it’s forced to be “woke,” and they had the chance to show us all what we’ve been missing and then failed this epically.
I mean, it wasn’t exactly a surprise given what they’ve put out before, but still. It was so, so fucking bad.
The movie starts out with Jonathan Majors and this other guy who turns out to be the father of the main character, and they’re in Mogadishu about to bring in a “prime target” so he can stand trial in the United States — because I guess they’re pretending that’s how we do things. Boy will they be surprised when they find out about Gitmo! So they walk into this home, kill a bunch of people, and then the non-Jonathan Majors guy tries to talk to a little kid and be nice to him, at which point he gets shot by some other guy they didn’t kill.
I tell you this, not because I plan on giving some shot-by-shot replay of the movie, but because that is the whole premise in a nutshell. Empathy, particularly for Muslim people, is foolish and will get you killed.
Anyway, this guy’s kid ends up going to school at an especially woke university where students are currently encamped in the middle of the quad to protest the United States’ support of Israel’s attack on Gaza. Naturally, they are led by an especially clueless, pretentious, and obnoxious blue-haired woke lib girl. You know, because they are always so het up about blue hair for some reason. There’s a bit of a conflict though, because the school is supposed to put on its annual carnival and for some reason can’t do that anywhere else on their very expansive grounds. Most of the staff and school board is on the side of the student activists, except for a pregnant professor who is like “But the quad is for everyone! Why shouldn’t everyone get to enjoy it? Tell them they have 72 hours to pack it up!” and then everyone is mean to her.
Pregnant professor is probably one of the most glaring pointless side plots in the movie and it appears that her main function is to be the unfair recipient of woke criticism and to give birth during the height of the “action” while hiding behind her desk.
Meanwhile, a school employee we are meant to see as a “typical HR lady” interviews and hires Ibrahim, a Muslim, as a janitor and is just a little too respectful of his background and religious beliefs, and a little too down on America (telling him, after he says that he loves America, that it’s not all its cracked up to be).
Ibrahim, however, is an ISIL-affiliated terrorist and also the son of the “prime target” that Jonathan Majors had brought in, and he is plotting to turn the school (and eventually the whole country) into a caliphate to “replace” the one destroyed by the US. He spends the whole first part of the movie sneaking around putting guns in the school’s many sewers and garbage cans, in preparation for the invasion. Uh oh! Just think of the lives that could have been saved if only that HR lady had been a little more Islamophobic.
Ibrahim is also, by the way, secretly working via text message with the blue-haired feminist lady, who thinks he’s just a nice Palestinian man who wants peace or whatever.
At this point, you’re probably wondering “What about the main characters, though?” Well, honestly, they’re not really doing too much at this point. The main-main character, I guess, is Devlin, the son of the guy who got killed with Jonathan Majors, and he is mostly busy trying to get with this gal Lizzy, by doing this crazy old-fashioned thing called “walking up and talking to her” despite being warned by his friend that you’re not supposed to do that anymore. His roommate PJ is a weird, video-game obsessed, valor-stealing douchebag we later learn only pretended to serve overseas but was never actually deployed. He spends a lot of time harassing the activist students in hopes of impressing Avery, a future Fox News blonde and “reporter” for … something? I don’t really know. Probably Project Veritas.
Naturally, he is one of the heroes of this joint.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, Jonathan Majors comes to the school to give a talk, and Devlin and his crush are both in the audience (he was on the VIP list!) even though it seems like he’s supposed to be mad at him because he thinks he got his dad killed. Majors starts talking about how “there are three ways Islam will conquer the West: through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation's freedoms against us.”
And that is the moment at which the terrorists decide to strike, coming up from the sewers and whatnot, armed to the teeth and ready to kill. At some point after some major killing, Ibrahim meets the student activists on the rooftop for the scene you have probably actually seen a bunch at this point, as they seem to think it is really quite clever. The blue-haired girl activist is like “I didn’t realize there’d be so much killing” and Ibrahim is like, “No, this is the exact right amount of killing” and starts weirdly talking about how people in the US aren’t even having babies, in order to drive home the current pet concern of the American Right, but tells them they’ll be able to tell the children about this glorious day. So blue-haired activist girl tells him they’re not going to have kids because she’s pansexual and her guy friend says “And I’m gay,” at which point Ibrahim kicks him off the roof. You know, because the Right loves that “Sure, we hate gay people and don’t want them to have rights, but in some Islamic countries they throw them off of rooftops!” thing, like they don’t realize that they’re basically saying “We’re a moderate version of the terrible people we just told you about!”
Oh. There is also a Black security guard named Terrance who “stands up” to the activists while doing his job telling them to get out so they can set up the carnival and gets called an Uncle Tom by a white woman, tells a little girl who lost her dad (because there are children at this university carnival? It’s very confusing!) “I’m still looking for mine,” and shares PJ’s confusion over commercials featuring interracial couples. His function in this film is to demonstrate that the activists are the real racists who don’t care about working people and that cool Black people are totally fine with blatant right-wing racism. There’s also a Korean character who shares a similar function. Towards the end of the movie, he uses a computer to disarm a bomb and when asked how he did that, responds “I’m Asian.”
It’s an Asian thing! When they’re kids, they go to their piano lessons and chess club and then afterwards go to their bomb disarming classes.
Oh! And there’s a random Nazi who is on the side of the terrorists. Like he’s a white blonde German with a swastika tattoo who … is Muslim now? I guess? Because he hates Jewish people? There seriously are just way too many characters in this film.
Anyway, the main character crew — Devlin, PJ, and Terrance — decide to take up arms against the terrorists while the government stands around the perimeter of the college doing nothing. At this point, they decide they’ve done enough random mass murder for the time being and start in on building their caliphate by, uh, forcing the women to shower in order to cleanse them of their evil Western sins so they can be the brides of the Caliph (who will be Ibrahim’s father) and all of the other terrorists, and making everyone record a bunch of statements in front of an Islamic State flag about how they’ve accepted Allah as their one true god and what have you.
Oh, except for a trans student, who they kill and tie to the flagpole with the Progress Pride flag.
While this is going on, the main characters bust in and free some of the people who were all being lined up to make their video statements/become war brides, but what’s confusing is that all of the girls are wearing their normal clothes at this point, but then are suddenly wearing burkas when they escape. Does not seem to be the optimal time for a costume change, but ymmv.
This is also when that lady gives birth. Remember her? I barely did! She nearly gets attacked by one of the terrorists while trying to cut her own umbilical cord but is saved by Terrance, and that is the end of her part in this movie.
So, at this point a bunch of people run to the police outside the school, including Devlin and PJ — who are initially mistaken for a terrorists and tased in probably the only funny-ish scene in the whole movie. But there are still people inside, including their love interests, and the police/FBI won’t do anything about it, not even FBI Deputy Chief Kristy Swanson, and she used to be Buffy. So they team up with Jonathan Majors (who left earlier after he was shot but is apparently better now) to rescue them. They do all the rescuing, and then eventually Majors finds the Caliph/bad guy he didn’t kill before when he had the chance and pulls his gun out. The bad guy is like “Ha! That is not the American way! The American way is task forces and climate change and abortion!” (I did not make that up, he literally said that) and then Jonathan Majors shoots him and is all like “No, that’s the American way.”
Finally, Devlin rescues his lady love on the carousel, and PJ gets shot while trying to rescue his lady, but it only hits him in the bulletproof vest, and I guess after that everything is fine? Because then they all kiss and, swear to God … “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” starts playing. Like the song, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Like, hundreds of people are dead but they’re having a romantic carnival moment to a one-hit wonder from 1993 that has nothing to do with anything at all.
There’s a lot more. Like, there are so many weird details thrown in that make absolutely no sense — like that Lizzy’s dad is a tech billionaire but no one knows it, except somehow the terrorists find out and … make her address him directly in her video? But she refuses! There are also some very weird and old-timey lines, like when some girl throws her drink in PJ’s face and he’s like “Ugh! Right in the peepers!”
The peepers!
You know, I realize that Ben Shapiro didn’t write this himself, but if your whole villain origin story is getting rejected from Hollywood, wouldn’t you at least try to put something out that is less objectively crappy?
He’s trying to pretend now that he’s not hurt by the reaction to the film, claiming that the “haters” who don’t understand that “it’s an action movie” are making it a hit, except it’s not even bad in a cult classic, The Room kind of way. It’s just bad.
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Shapiro spends a lot of time complaining about how “woke” movies are trying to hit people over the head with political posturing, but no “woke” movie or TV show on earth has ever been this overt.
What we’re supposed to be seeing here is the grand irony of all the dumb “woke” students finding out that the people they’re defending actually hate them. This has been a thing on the Right forever, this “Oh, sure, you hate us because we hate gay people and feminism and want to establish a theocracy, but you don’t like it when we bomb or even just generally oppress legions of Muslim people, many of whom hate gay people and feminism and love theocracy even more than we do?” thing. And I’ve always thought that this, on some level, kind of hurts their feelings.
For me, this is not hard. I would be opposed to anyone being treated that way, regardless of what they believe about me or those I care about, because that’s not the point. I don’t want to bomb anyone! If the United States government were to decide “Hey, we’re gonna go bomb the Daily Wire,” I would be opposed to that.
The real irony is, frankly, that the “bad guys” here actually share the views of many Daily Wire hosts. Ben Shapiro might not kick a gay guy off a rooftop, but he said he wouldn’t even go to his “friend” Dave Rubin’s house for his anniversary party because of how they are sinful and he can’t celebrate sin. Both Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles want the United States to be a Christian theocracy. They’re all mad at women having rights, they’re all mad at LGBTQ+ people for existing and having rights, and, given their support of ICE, it’s clear that they’re not afraid of violence being used to get what they want.
Indeed, in one of the very few scenes Jonathan Majors is actually in, he describes the Muslim evildoers as being opposed to the separation of church and state and women’s rights, two things the Daily Wire is not known to be fond of, either.
It would be incredible if any of them could take a moment and consider that the “bad guys” are just doing a more extreme and more violent version of what they want to do, but the fact is, if any of them had that much self-awareness, they never would have released this “film” in the first place.
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Panther in the park update. I am now almost certain the kitty already has a home. Last night was rainy and cold; all the bushes, grass, etc. are still wet. Kitty showed up today looking freshly brushed, not wet and the burrs on her back from yesterday had been removed.
Which is good, she looks healthy and appears to have a place that is safe and warm. She is just out here scamming wet food off suckers, lol.
Another kitty will find me.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-343183091?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Will not be a Movie Night selection, sorry to disappoint!