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

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The right-wing media company the Daily Wire has a new movie, its 12 th , 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.