‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’: A Wake-up Call to Jihad on American Soil - Aman Shanti News

TV-MA | 2h 9m | Action Thriller | 2026

Director Kyle Rankin follows up his school-shooter thriller “Run Hide Fight” (2020) with “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” which is about a military veteran battling jihadists on an American college campus.

At first glance, one might assume the film has the intent of trolling and antagonizing Muslims and “owning the libs,” seeing that its distributor is conservative media platform The Daily Wire. The movie is currently streaming there.

While it is a bona fide whistle-blowing and an attempt at a wake-up call, the film’s execution undermines its own best intentions by being all over the place tonally. Its light, humorous approach to this subject matter, along with an across-the-board, comically reductive treatment of characters, regardless of their partisanship, is at cross-purposes with the film effectively hitting home.

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Jihad!

Lead actor Jonathan Majors appears mostly at the beginning and end of the film, where he gives a fairly disengaged performance as Clay Saunders, an Army Delta Force captain whose teammate was killed while the two of them were apprehending an Isis mastermind. Majors is a powerhouse actor when he’s got a meaty role to chew on and is backed by other world-class actors. Majors is main reason I was looking forward to this movie.

Seven years later, Saunders embarks on a book tour for his new book “America Unafraid,” which outlines the all the ways Islam will attempt to conquer the West.

man in dark grey suit stands at podium in Run Hide Fight: Infidels

Saunders arrives at fictitious Laughton University for a promotional appearance in front of a packed auditorium. His appearance coincides with the day that a group of Muslim extremists have infiltrated a group of stereotypically blue-haired, nose-ringed, queer, anti-Palestine campus protestors, and goaded them into taking over the student union. These furtive jihadists hope to establish a new caliphate on the American university’s campus.

The Objective Is Appreciated

“Run Hide Fight: Infidels” could have been a taut Delta Force-versus-Jihadist shoot-out and a serious lesson about why America needs stricter immigration enforcement. Instead, its incongruous script makes it feel like a somewhat toothless mash-up of 1977’s “Animal House” and 2020’s HBO’s alternate-history miniseries “The Plot Against America.”

That miniseries dealt with a hypothetical authoritarian, fascist takeover of the United States (a likely dig at the current administration) rather than modern Islamist jihadism. It explored how a populist, isolationist shift would fracture and overtake American democracy from within.

Students mill about holding American flag in

“Run Hide Fight: Infidels” feels like the filmmakers had a little too much fun roasting the protesting students rather than sincerely trying to enlighten leftists. It would have been more impactful to elucidate exactly how these students are thoroughly clueless of the role snickeringly assigned to them by communists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—the role of the “useful idiots.” That is, those who unwittingly facilitate a society’s imperceptible slide towards communism. And why communism, like Jihad, is deadly.

The film seems to want to cut the throats of the smug, liberal-and-progressive-tenet-spouting kids. It literally does so, on a rooftop, with a wicked-looking Arabic dagger. This fails to function as a real warning about Islam. Instead, it says: See what you get when you insist on open borders?

In accordance with the movie’s overall feel, senior vice president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council Hollywood Bureau, Sue Obeidi, has called the film “more ridiculous than it is offensive.” While ridiculous is better than offensive, because offensiveness blocks learning—realism should have been the objective.

Let’s Get Serious

I’m a big fan of military thriller novels written by former Green Beret, Delta Force, and Navy SEAL operators. In them, the authors describe a myriad of ways the Jihadists will be coming for America.

I almost wonder why these books are allowed to be published. It’s like the authors are doing all the Jihadis’ best thinking and planning for them—they are a collective laundry list of all kinds of fiendish and diabolical ways radical Islam can punch America’s (the Great Satan) ticket. These books were undoubtedly studied in Afghanistan’s jihadist cave complexes in Tora Bora, and are almost certainly on the Jihad-wannabe syllabus.

While many critics have given “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” an “Islamophobic” label, the American military men who’ve actually been neck-deep in keeping America safe know of what they speak—been there, done that. When they say America’s got an Islam problem, I’m inclined to pay attention.

The first movie to utilize active-duty SEALS, “Act of Valor,“ features a narrative where the villainous jihadist plot is to slip suicide bombers across the U.S.–Mexico border. ”Act of Valor” was the first film that now-retired U.S. Navy SEAL and military adviser Ray Mendoza acted in.

I’d like to see Mendoza, who also co-wrote and co-directed last year’s excellent war film “Warfare,” tackle the Jihadist-takeover storyline. A Mendoza written-and-directed film about the extent of America’s vulnerability to radical Islamic threat would be worth seeing.

“Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” unfortunately, is not.

‘Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels’
Director: Kyle Rankin
Starring: Jonathan Majors, JC Kilcoyne, Tyler Aser
MPAA Rating: TV-MA
Running Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Release Date: Sept. 16, 2026
Rating: 2 1/2 stars out of 5

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