Review: Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel Was as Disappointing as I Feared.

Dailywire’s new movie Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel dropped last Wednesday and, as I promised I would do a review of it, I watched it. And almost everything that I had worried would happen in this movie when the trailer dropped happened.

Now, was the movie entertaining? Yes. I would also say that some of the writing was much better than the original Run, Hide, Fight. However, that’s pretty much the only good thing I can say about this movie.

The way that Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel was marketed was as a realistic portrayal of what could happen if Islam takes over. Dailywire marketed it as a scathing criticism of Islam and as such I hoped that they wouldn’t just reach for the low hanging fruit. I hoped that they would do their research, quote the Quran, hadiths, and maybe even Muhammad’s own biographies to show how evil Islam inherently is. I hoped that they would treat it with some nuance, too, and maybe work in the Shia/Sunni conflict. Since the bad guys appear to be Shia Muslim, it would have been interesting if there was a Sunni character who was having to fight for his/her life to against the Shias. But did Dailywire do any of that?

No.

For the entire 2 hour-long run time, the only actual quote from the Quran present in the movie was from Surah 8:30, where it says Allah is the best of planners. The only other direct quote from Islamic sources was from a hadith about purification, and a passing reference to a hadith about the 12 Imams, and both were misattributed to the Quran.

Why Dailywire did this, I have no clue, especially since they appear to have access to people like Raymond Ibrahim and Michael Jones from Inspiring Philosophy, who are both experts on Islam. Why couldn’t they have called them up and asked, “Hey, what are some good quotes from the Quran or other Islamic sources that we could work into the script?”

Seriously, it would have been so ridiculously easy to quote the Quran and hadiths in this movie in dialogue, someone’s monologue, whatever. The fact that Dailywire didn’t even try to do that but instead grabbed at the Muslim terrorist trope is sad, even if it’s true that Islam has been responsible for half of all the religious wars waged. It’s much easier to argue that you’re being Islamophobic when you make a movie that feels more like a stereotype of Muslims (even if it is based in truth), than if you make a movie that goes out of its way to quote Islamic texts and add nuance that shows more of Islam’s depravity.

Another issue I had with this movie is the fact that they didn’t even try to cite statistics on how Muslims take over countries. They barely touched it, even in the speech Jonathan Major’s character gives. Once again, it’s a detail that makes the movie feel poorly researched, like the only research they did was done on X.

Overall, I would give this movie a 4/10-star rating. The entertainment value was the only good part of it, but it really fails to give what it promised.

Until next time,

M.J.