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Behold the new and improved Jonathan Majors: paragon of hypermasculinity, the Denzel Washington of the Daily Wire, a Delta Force veteran forced back into action when his war on terror follows him onto home soil. Against all odds, he has tracked his way back to the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed analogue who killed his partner as the Americans were debating whether to bring the criminal mastermind to justice or execute him on the spot. Our Fox News jihadi has no doubt Captain Saunders will respect the letter of the law again. “The American way is your taskforces and your trials,” the enemy hisses. “Your climate change and your abortions – ”
Blam! A bullet cuts him down mid-monologue, and the camera pushes in as Captain Saunders lowers his semi-automatic rifle. “Actually, that’s the American way,” he says.
You can just imagine that scene, in an alternate reality where conservative crackpottery is gospel, furnishing the Oscar-reel clip for Run Hide Fight: Infidels – a Hollywood treatment for far-right fear-mongering that Majors has latched onto like a piece of Titanic driftwood. The latest release from Ben Shapiro’s Nashville-based streaming studio, intended as a bulwark against the wider film industry’s ostensibly liberal biases, Run Hide Fight: Infidels follows writer-director Kyle Rankin’s 2020 Daily Wire debut Run Hide Fight. Where the original film had a white teenage waif (1883’s Isabel May) fighting her way out of a high school shooting, this one thrusts Captain Saunders into an Islamist mass-casualty attack on a college campus. And if the sequel registers, who knows? A Sandy Hook-meets-Kindergarten Cop green light can’t be far behind.
Co-produced with Bonfire Legend, another macho studio headquartered in Austin, Infidels is not offered up as fodder for interpretation. The film made its intended message clear from the very first trailer, conflating fictional clips with actual footage of the 9/11 attacks, pro-Palestine protests and Fox News personalities, before revealing an IS flag flying over a college campus as the Islamic call echoed with doom. Then there was the tagline: “Coming soon … or already here?” Talk about twirling the mustache.
The reactions were as polarized as you would expect, with mainstream filmgoers and critics deriding the premise as xenophobic and Islamophobic, while rightwing commentators in the media and online cheered the brazen political incorrectness. “If you’re afraid to put radical jihadis as your villains,” said Bonfire’s Dallas Sonnier, “then you’re a wimpy movie producer. We don’t have that fear.”
The entertainment proposition with Infidels lies in how deeply it can offend the snowflakes. The 128-minute feature, which took me three tries to finish, plays like a PragerU student film. The characters aren’t so much colorful as they are drawn in crayon: the campus HR who’s dazzled by the mysterious terrorist sleeper cell in her midst, the spineless university president whose failure to crack down on student protests makes his campus vulnerable. Only the pregnant college professor, who just a few scenes earlier was urging the president to crack heads, stands out as totally incidental to this batshit story.
Meanwhile, the oafish Black campus security guard could be a last line of defense if he weren’t so lazy. At one point, he’s approached by a young girl who has become disoriented at the carnival that is also unfolding on campus.
“My daddy lost me,” she says.
“I’m still looking for mine,” he shoots back.
The terrorists in Infidels are cobbled from Heritage Foundation talking points, planting bombs around campus, herding “unclean” women into the showers to cleanse their souls and forcing Christ-loving scholars to swear allegiance to the caliphate in bin Laden-style broadcasts. Rankin turns punching down into a bingo game. Gluten allergy? Pow! Gay agenda? Shoved off a roof. Mainstream-media proxy? Off with his head, inshallah! Korean NPC? Maim him – but not so badly that he can’t hack the terrorists’ security mainframe, or explain how he pulled off the impossible (“I’m Asian”). No scene, it seems, can pass without a parting pun. Yet they hardly grate as much as Rankin’s liberal use of AI for newscasts and other screen filler. Overall, the film’s “bad Muslim” conceit is as dated as an 90s alt-rock soundtrack – headlined by Deep Blue Something’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Majors disappears into the role of a Temu Equalizer, railing against sharia law’s incursion into the west when he isn’t dodging bullets, screaming for cover or crashing through plate glass – a botched stunt that tipped a crew strike, one the production had apparently hoped to forestall by shooting in right-to-work South Carolina. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to picture another disgraced actor bringing as much commitment to the one-note role of Captain Saunders as Majors – who, doubtless, had stronger scene partners at Yale than in this stiff cast. As he pops in and out of this low-budget, provocative-for-provocation’s-sake thriller – one minute bleeding out and clinging to life; the next, completely healed without hint of explanation – it was hard not to be reminded of just how he wound up at professional rock bottom.
Three years ago, Majors was Hollywood’s hottest property, a young hunk with range. His breakout roles in HBO’s Lovecraft Country and Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods not only marked him as a future superstar but put him on a fast track that Black actors rarely reach so early in their careers, if ever. Marvel tapped him to play Kang the Conqueror, a supervillain with an arc across the MCU. But just before that work really got going, Majors was arrested after an altercation with his girlfriend and found guilty of two misdemeanor counts of assault and harassment.
The consequences were immediate. Marvel recast Kang, bringing Robert Downey Jr out of retirement, the US army dropped Majors as a spokesperson and he became persona non grata in the industry. Despite attempts to rebuild his public reputation in the media and rally Black community support – including making a great show of having moved on from his white accuser to dating Black Hollywood princess Meagan Good, now his wife – Majors never recovered. His next film, Magazine Dreams, a bodybuilding feature that was touted as Oscar bait, landed with a thud. Other potential high-profile collaborations soon fell through despite the apology tour and Majors completing a domestic violence intervention program. In the intervening years, some online observers have wondered whether Majors was punished more harshly than white male actors who found themselves in similar predicaments and bounced back. But it could be that Majors’s real crime was devastating a multibillion-dollar franchise plan – and making other studios wary of getting burned, too.
And so older with flecks of gray for character but still in fine fettle, Majors is stuck at the Daily Wire, doing political kabuki – but for how much longer? Infidels is his first fresh production since his 2023 legal troubles, and at a glance it hardly scans like the kind of work that could spring a comeback. But the political winds have shifted since Hollywood turned its back on Majors. #MeToo and wokeness have given way to incel culture and DEI crackdowns. Rightwing media fixtures run the government. In a climate that protects abusers, whether targeting women or beasts, one would have to think it’s only a matter of time before Majors is returned to prominence – because that’s the American way.
