The Daily Wire Decided to Make a Die Hard–esque Movie About Campus Protest. It Is Every Bit As Deranged As You Might Think.

Movies Ben Shapiro’s Company Made a Die Hard–Style Movie About College Israel Protests. It Is Every Bit As Deranged As You Might Think. I watched Run Hide Fight: Infidels so you don’t have to. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Rebecca Onion? Sept 16, 20261:14 PM The Daily Wire Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The right-wing media company the Daily Wire has a new movie, its 12th, a not-really sequel to its 2021 school-shooting action film Run Hide Fight. The two features are narratively tied together only briefly, by a blink-and-you-miss-it reference in Run Hide Fight: Infidels (available today if you subscribe to Daily Wire+ for $14.99 a month, north of the cost for HBO Max and Hulu) to the school where the first movie took place. Both movies are connected by a larger politics of violence that will make them pretty upsetting to viewers unused to seeing school shootings used as a setting for a Die Hard–ish action film. In the Run Hide Fight universe, campus shootings are less a tragedy and more a chance for the best, toughest kids to dig deep and dominate the situation. Both of these movies, directed by Kyle Rankin, poke at liberal sensitivity around gun violence, but Infidels adds a new layer of up-to-the-minute culture war by putting campus protest against the war in Gaza at the center of the narrative, and hiring convicted abuser Jonathan Majors to anchor its cast. (Majors was Emmy-nominated for Lovecraft Country and getting good press for his work playing villain Kang the Conqueror in several Marvel properties before his March 2023 arrest and subsequent trial.) The actor, one of a few stars circumventing cancellation by signing onto right-wing productions, may or may not have regretted this choice. When you look up details on the production of Infidels, you find a really fun Deadline headline: “Jonathan Majors Fell Through a Window on Daily Wire Action Flick, Leading Crew to Walk Off Set; Producers Say They ‘Don’t Negotiate With Communists.’ ” The union of entertainment workers IATSE called a strike against the production while it was ongoing, apparently due to a series of safety concerns. Producer Dallas Sonnier, in a comment, said he and his fellow producers were “too busy being bad asses, blowing sh*t up, flying helicopters, and killing movie terrorists to concern ourselves with four assholes with signs on the sidewalk and their illegitimate ‘strike.’ ” Reading this, you start to understand the ridiculous end of Run Hide Fight: Infidels, in which a traumatized campus responds to a devastating attack perpetrated by a group of Islamic terrorists and ongoing hostage situation by protesting the presence and involvement of the FBI. Protesters! They’re never happy! Run Hide Fight: Infidels, like its predecessor, amps up the body count for drama, depicting an attack on a scale beyond anything that’s ever happened on a real American college campus.The deadliest college shooting is still Virginia Tech’s in 2007, which resulted in 32 killed and 17 wounded; meanwhile, poor fictional Laughton University suffers casualties in what must be the hundreds. Midway through the attack, the quad is strewn with dead students and professors—random innocents who serve as backdrop for the punishments the script metes out to the characters who stay alive, all of whom were living in a campus bubble, and will suffer for it. There are only a few characters—Majors’ Clay Saunders, a retired Delta Force captain who’s visiting campus to give a speech warning that Muslims are trying to use “the wombs of our women” to take over the country; a pregnant professor who advocates for the student protesters to be forcibly evicted from the quad—who think “correctly” about the issues at hand before the story starts. Even the students who end up the heroes of the story are unevenly informed, and seem to care mostly about video games and bootlegging dorm-room whiskey. There’s a feeling of evil glee to the carnage wrought in Infidels that goes beyond anything you see in the first Run Hide Fight, and beyond anything that happens in, say, a Taylor Sheridan show, where wokies get scolded for their wrongthink in speeches that feel like they’ve been ripped from Facebook, but don’t tend to be outright murdered. (Sheridan finds the wokies more fun alive than dead.) Infidels thinks these unserious college people must be punished, and once the initial wave of killings is over, the terrorists hold a group hostage so the movie can make this point. A terrorist forces a beautiful female student wearing a tight shirt and short shorts to stand up and points to parts of her body, declaring them “haram.” Every girl has to strip and shower in the locker room, under the eye of a few other terrorists; they will, the terrorists say, be made “brides,” and, crying, are forced to dress in niqab. The foolish HR admin who hired the main terrorist as a custodian at the beginning of the movie, saying in the course of their conversation that she wanted to visit Syria because it was “exotic” and that she didn’t like the Catholic Church anymore because it was too “judgey,” spends the last half of the movie as a hostage, before she’s shot in the back trying to run away. But the worst is what happens to the leaders of the protest encampment, one of whom is a silly purple-haired keffiyah-wearing young woman, Farrah, who says things like “Zionism is a supremacist modality” but wilts when a peer challenges her as to why she describes Israel as an “apartheid society” when there are Arabs living in Israel but no Israelis living in Gaza. “The Jews aren’t supposed to be there. It’s stolen land,” she stutters, to which he smugly replies, “You’re on stolen land! This whole area once belonged to the Monacan Tribal Nation,” and a fellow activist steps in, saying, “We already did a land acknowledgement, on Day 1!” (Yes, entire stretches of this movie do strongly recall one of those Jubilee debate videos.) Farrah makes advance contact with the terrorists, not knowing the extent of their plans, and helps them get on campus; her payment is getting her throat cut. The other campus leader, Land Acknowledgement Guy, is a student with extremely effeminate mannerisms. “We just didn’t expect so much … death,” he says to the head terrorist. The terrorist, belatedly realizing this person is gay, kicks the young man off a roof—an apparent reference to the killing of two gay men by ISIS in Syria in 2015, a true event that has since been invoked online as a way to discredit Western campus supporters of Palestine. Finally, one of their fellow activists, apparently trans, gets killed and strung up the flagpole in the LGBTQ+ flag they’d been wearing as a cape. It’s a small group of college students who fight back. The kids each do what they can; Molotov cocktails and disguises come into play. There’s also an overweight Black security officer who steps up, shooting terrorists and becoming comic relief. (“Shooting people is one thing, but making us take all these stairs is diabolical,” he complains to one of the students as they execute a plan to take two snipers in a tower. The student suggests: “Just pretend your insulin is up there.”) The students get off many little one-liners—after a weight room fight, a terrorist dies with his head smashed in a leg press, and the student who kills him quips, “Never skip leg day.” Unfortunately, because he’s the only actor who holds the screen in this movie, Majors’ character is sidelined with an injury for most of the story. Before his conviction, a lot of people loved watching this actor because of his combination of strength and emotional vulnerability, and his ability to get a little bit quirky. But Capt. Saunders is just a stock Special Forces guy, smarter and more confident and knowledgeable than everyone, and Majors’ character is also the only “real” adult on a campus full of kids and nitwit college professors. It’s not hard for Majors to make Saunders feel much more present than everyone else in this movie, but the end result is seriously imbalanced, like Jonathan Majors brought a gun to a knife fight. Near the end of the movie, Majors’ character seeks out the big boss terrorist, who’s in military custody, and threatens to shoot him. The terrorist reminds him he’s shackled, and laughs at him: “This is not the American way. The American way is your task forces, and your trials, your climate change and your abortions.” Beside the prisoner, you can see a line of boots, soldiers sitting on a bench, presumably there as his guards. Saunders shoots him anyway, saying: “Actually, that’s the American way”—then spits, for good measure. The boots of those soldiers never move an inch. Maybe this is the American way. But it’s still a free country. I’m allowed to say I find it pretty freaking disturbing. College Domestic Violence Guns Labor Movies Protests Racism Republicans Terrorism Death