“Translator”: Unusually Serious Guy Ritchie

2018, the US Army has been fighting the Taliban (an organization recognized as a terrorist organization and banned in the Russian Federation) in Afghanistan for the second decade. Sergeant John Kinley’s squad (Jake Gyllenhaal – Donnie Darko, Source Code, Prince of Persia) urgently needs a new Afghan military translator to replace the old one they killed. He is recommended Ahmed (Dar Salim – Kvoto from the “Game of Thrones”) – a silent man with a dark past and a difficult reputation: wayward, smart, but he seems to know his business very well.

The opening credits reveal that over the 20 years of the military campaign, the US Army hired 50,000 local translators who were promised relocation to the United States for their cooperation. The final credit is that most of them were left to fend for themselves and many died at the hands of the Taliban. Apparently director Guy Ritchie (Locks, Stocks, Two Smoking Barrels) and his regular writers Ivan Atkinson and Marne Davies (who worked together on The Gentlemen, The Wrath of Men and Operation Fortune) conceived their film as a manifesto and mournful repentance.