What ‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’ Teaches Hollywood—and Us 

On Sept. 20, The Daily Wire released its new movie “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.” Daily Wire, a conservative media company based in Nashville, produces a variety of podcasts, television series, and full-length motion pictures. Without a Hollywood budget, Daily Wire ventures into waters no other filmmaker dares.  

Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh has made two documentaries: “What is a Woman” in 2022, which revealed the contradictions of gender ideology, and “Am I a Racist” in 2024, where, with his signature irony and wit, Walsh gives woke “antiracists” enough rope to hang themselves.  

Daily Wire also made the film “Lady Ballers,” in which a group of men decide to identify as women for the purposes of winning basketball games—a ridiculous premise now playing out in real life as former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White declare for the WNBA draft.  

Daily Wire’s first “Run Hide Fight,” released in 2020, was about a mass killing in a high school. The 2026 sequel, “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” is about a mass terrorist attack at a fictional college in Virginia. The state is a fitting choice, as the home of an ultra-woke governor, Abigail Spanberger, and prosecutor, Steve Descano, who releases criminals without bail and has dropped charges against illegal immigrants—at least one of whom later allegedly committed murder. 

The plot of “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is simple: Islamic terrorists invade a college campus, kill dozens, and take hostages to obtain the release of their leader. He had been captured in Somalia years earlier by a former Delta Force captain, who happens to be speaking on campus that very day about the threat of Islam to the West. The captain, a few plucky students, and a chunky wit of a security guard arm up, form a ragtag A-Team and save the day.  

The film is a sort of 1980s mash-up of a college dorm movie like “Revenge of the Nerds” with a straight-to-video Van Damme action flick. Remember those quotable ’80s lines? “I’ll be back.” “Welcome to the party, pal.” “I ain’t got time to bleed.” The movie’s script is a bit stilted at times, but it has a few of those. When one of the good guys shoots a terrorist in the gym, he says: “Never skip leg day.” When a bystander asks what the mayhem on campus is about, the security guard says: “We have a very active shooter.”  

The movie’s characters are cliché but accurate. The blue-haired, nose ring-sporting student activists are much as you would see on any campus today. They wear keffiyehs, put tents on the quad, and snap their fingers instead of applauding. The apparently nonbinary person says it went “no contact” with its parents. Etc.  

The faculty lounge scene is spot on too, with an assembly of leftist academics, only one of whom, a pregnant woman of color, advocates shutting down the protests on campus so people can get back to teaching and studying. 

As you would expect, the film has been getting attention for reasons nothing to do with its qualities as a film. Legacy media critics have savaged it. The movie’s Wikipedia page reads like it was written by the Oberlin chapter of Students for Justice for Palestine.  

In truth, “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is not a fantastic film, but nor is it a terrible one. It’s an entertaining two hours in the shoot-’em-up tradition of “The Dirty Dozen” and “Rambo.” Shut down your brain, open a few beers, and enjoy some mayhem.  

As you’d expect, there are no major stars, the most famous actors are canceled Marvel actor Jonathan Majors as the hero soldier and Jason Gray-Stanford from the TV show “Monk” as the spineless dean. A few standout lesser-known actors are Stephen Hailo as the terrorist leader and David Lucas as the security guard.  

Overall, the movie cries out for the kinds of production value, writing, and cast that the mainstream U.S. movie industry simply won’t give a project like this. Why is that?  

We have tens of thousands of disaster movies, hundreds of movies about the Vietnam War, and thousands about World War II. But there are almost none about Islamist terrorist attacks. 

Yet mass-casualty, Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks are a potential mine of dramatic material. In Europe, there were bombings or suicide attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005, 2017), Paris (2015), Brussels (2016), Nice (2016), Berlin (2016), and Manchester (2017). 

In America, Islamist-inspired terrorists killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, three in Boston in 2013, five in Chattanooga and 14 in San Bernardino in 2015, and 49 in Orlando in 2016. I can’t find a single movie about any of these events. 

As for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed almost 3,000 people, I can find only one drama that deals with the actual terrorists and their acts, “United 93.” There is no movie about American Airlines Flight 11 or United Airlines Flight 175, the two that hit the Twin Towers, or American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon.  

The obvious reason is that no one in Hollywood wants to portray Islamist terrorists saying and doing what they really say and do. They can separate Germans from Nazis, and Vietnamese from Viet Cong, but not Muslims from Islamist terrorists. Perhaps because there are no real Nazis or VC out there threatening Hollywood for its depictions of them.  

In many serious World War II movies, from the 1965 blockbuster “Battle of the Bulge” to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 “Schindler’s List,” the Germans are portrayed as saying and doing things Germans did and said. Yet from 1962’s “The Longest Day” to 1998’s “Saving Private Ryan,” many have won Oscars.  

The careers of actors playing murderous Nazis have only prospered. In “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket,” the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Minh guerillas are also portrayed as they were; committed to the communist takeover of Vietnam and to killing American soldiers. Yet their producers, directors, and actors suffered no blowback. 

Islamism is different. It’s a no-go zone for the American film industry. I looked up which actors had played Osama bin Laden in films and found only four. Two were Hindi-language movies, and one was a 2012 TV movie. The fourth, and the only American feature film, was Katherine Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty.” In it, British-Indian actor Ricky Sekhon played bin Laden. You don’t remember him? Maybe it’s because Sekhon had not one word of dialogue and “gets only a few seconds of screen time, most of it dead on the floor.” Also, as “a creative decision” by the director and writer, “his face is never shown” to the audience.  

Many movies show Nazis discussing exterminating Jews and methodically killing Allied soldiers and civilians, although these views are reprehensible to their audience. Yet no movie takes even a few minutes to give bin Laden a chance to expound on his worldview, which led him and al-Qaeda to bomb two U.S. embassies and a U.S. Navy warship and to carry out the 9/11 attacks.  

In 2023, some historically illiterate young people seized on bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and found it “eye opening.” Today, our campuses teem with students who believe America is the oppressor and terrorists are victims. Perhaps some more accurate and daring portrayals on our screens of what Islamists actually believe, say, and do in real life would help dispel that myth.  

“Run Hide Fight: Infidels” may not be “Ben-Hur,” but it has the courage to take on that challenge. Let’s hope Hollywood is brave enough to follow one day.  

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