'Infidel' Isn’t Good, But It Serves a Market that Feels Unserved
Photo courtesy of Cloudburst Entertainment
(REVIEW) The weekend’s box office success of Infidel, a faith-based political thriller starring Jim Caviezel and the first narrative feature from political author and documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza (who executive produced this film), shows the continued power of faith-based and conservative audiences—and makes one wish that the audience had better films available to them.
Infidel topped the Friday box office and came in third in total its opening weekend, prompting cheers from conservative and Christian crowds. Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh, Iranian-American filmmaker behind The Stoning of Soraya M., Infidel tells the story of Doug Rawlins (Caviezel) a Christian blogger who is kidnapped by terrorists working for Iran in Cairo, Egypt and the attempts of his wife, who works at the U.S. State department, to free him.
Most analysts attribute this success to the power of faith-based film audiences and the present lack of options in movie theaters. Infidel also benefits from strong support from political conservatives. Because it’s pro-American, pro-Israel, anti-Iran and many other things political conservatives (who overlap very strongly with faith-based audiences) like, conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan have publicly come out in support of the film.
It’s unfortunate that the movie itself is rather lacking.
Infidel is, to put it bluntly, not a very good film. It is too dull and joyless to be a fun action-thriller and too implausibly heroic to be a grounded political thriller. Several convenient co-incidences help the heroes far too often, and Jim Caviezel’s character literally punches one of the villains like John Wayne and single- handedly bests trained soldiers with perfectly timed attacks.
The dialogue and character development are thin and confusing enough to make it unsatisfying as a character piece. And the political messaging is often ham-fisted and feels like they’re trying to list talking-points they want the viewers to absorb, like recent movies Black Christmas (2019) and Unpregnant did for feminism and abortion, and Ip Man 4 did for American racism, respectively.
That said, I still understand the appeal. I’m just conservative and Christian enough to feel a satisfaction at finally seeing at the movies a sympathetic and heroic presentation of an American Christian being persecuted for his faith in Iran, and to have the Americans team up with the Israelis to save the day. Things like Iran’s taking Americans as political prisoners, Christian persecution in the Middle East and American’s partnership with Israel are all a part of the political world we live in and doesn’t get portrayed much in Hollywood.
Even 24 never really represented Christians in the conflict between the West and extremism. A Tom Clancy-esque political thriller with those elements could have been really enjoyable. So even though I wasn’t extremely satisfied as a moviegoer, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of catharsis out of the experience.
Christian film critic Tyler Smith summed up on his website how this appeal and its downsides often plague right-leaning films of Infidel’s type:
“Most movies made by either conservatives or Christians tend to be produced in defiant response to Hollywood’s brazen left-leaning perspective, and perhaps understandably so. For all its concern about accurate representation, if there’s one group that Hollywood seems perfectly comfortable generalizing about, it’s conservatives. One of the downsides of this is in the conservative response, which can involve making movies that are so tonally apoplectic (as if to say, “Look! We can generalize too!”), that the story, characters and general style suffers. The latest example of this is Cyrus Nowrasteh’s Infidel, which wastes a compelling story by focusing much more on its ideological agenda.”
Then you have the issue of the Muslim characters. For a film that wants us to believe it is portraying what the “real” world is like, it gives a very deceptive view of American Muslims. The affluent and supposedly progressive Muslim friend of Rawlins is portrayed as a wealthy American who appears to hold progressive Western values but is secretly an extremist recruiting for terrorist organizations.
In reality, American Muslims are extremely unlikely to be extremists. European societies are far more likely than America to produce anti-Western extremists. As Dr. Robert Carle, Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at The King’s College in New York writes:
“In contrast to American Muslims, who tend to be affluent, integrated and educated, second- and third-generation European Muslims are more alienated from European cultures than their parents and grandparents were. European countries seem incapable of fashioning a national identity that can connect Muslim youth to a common democratic culture, as the American creed does for immigrants to the United States.”
Americans can take pride in the fact that America does such a good job at making the country a land of opportunity for Muslims that most Muslims have no interest in undermining it. It’s weird for conservatives, who never miss an opportunity to explain why America is better than Europe, would miss this opportunity to brag how America really is better than Europe in a movie that is so shamelessly patriotic.
And the thing is, you don’t have to lean into inaccurate Muslim stereotypes in order to deal with real differences between Christianity and Islam and deal with real differences between the West and totalitarian regimes in the Middle East.
The Amazon series Jack Ryan is a great example of how to portray the conflict between the West and Muslim extremism. They never shy away from showing the superiority of Western values to Islamic extremists, but they also have a heroic main character, James Greer, be Muslim in a way that shows how most Muslims in America integrate their faith with pluralistic Western values. They show him struggle with his faith, his relationships and his duty to his country while being committed to the American way of life.
The first season even alludes to the success that America has had in integrating Muslims, as opposed to Europe, with a revealing bit of dialogue: “In America you can be African and be an American. You can be a Mexican-American, an Italian-American, a Chinese-American. In France, there are no hyphenates. You are either French, or you are not.”
What’s still nowhere in that show, though, is someone who represents Christianity in the West. Jack Ryan is a completely secular Western man in his outlook and his lifestyle and so doesn’t represent the Western Christians in this conflict and how their faith-identity informs their relationship with the West and Islamic extremism.
This is why the film Infidel could have been the film to fill that gap in representation. And it’s why it’s sad those looking for that representation don’t have a better movie to do the job.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated independent filmmaker and film critic living out of New York City. He runs a blog Overthinking Films where he discusses how films connect to philosophy, society, and culture.