When Kyle Rankin directed Run Hide Fight, he didn’t know his film would become a launch title for The Daily Wire’s conservative entertainment branch. His movie, best described as Die Hard Goes to High School, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was produced by the thriving Texas studio Cinestate. But Cinestate fell into disarray because it was a horrible place to work, with abusive work practices, leading the studio to rebrand as Bonfire Legend and push its productions to The Daily Wire, the only company that would distribute Run Hide Fight. Rankin could defend himself against the embarassing association by saying The Daily Wire had no input on the film he made. But now he has made a sequel that has all of The Daily Wire’s stink all over it.

Like the previous film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels can be seen as Die Hard Goes to College, but more like a cartoonish version of what middle-aged conservatives imagine. Set at a Virginian university, pro-Palestine student activists are portrayed as loud, obnoxious, and self-righteous figures with blue hair and LGBTQ flags. Their latest protests are against a Zionist guest speaker, Captain Clay Saunders, portrayed by the disgraced Jonathan Majors after his central role in Marvel Studios movies was destroyed by his assault charges. Saunders preaches that Islam is the biggest threat to the world and that it needs to be wiped out. In his mind, he believes those activists wouldn’t be speaking out against the genocide in Gaza if Islamic extremists came to their campus and started murdering all the students deemed unworthy. And since this film is set in conservative propaganda land, absurd stuff like that can happen.

The movie is populated not with characters, but with vessels for talking points that spew poorly from their mouths. P.J. is an ex-U.S. Army soldier taking classes and is framed as the most aggressively unlikable roommate for his bigoted views, but all his gross traits will be warranted once bullets start flying. The big reveal later is that he never saw combat in the service, but this is easy to deduce given how awful he is at wielding weapons. Ibrahim Asad Melod is the ISIS leader who orchestrates the campus attack, but his methods are baffling, as he takes hostages in exchange for the release of his father AND to establish a new caliphate by forcing the hostages to accept Islam. How they plan to hold this caliphate in Virginia with only a handful of terrorists with guns makes no sense, forcing the movie to weaken so much of the response towards it. Kwan is a Korean student who is an expert hacker because he’s Korean, and no, that’s not reaching for racist dogwhistles; the script earnestly has him saying he’s good at computers because of his race. The only character who comes close to being seen as human is Devlin, a student and the son of a soldier slaughtered alongside Saunders. It seems like there are important conversations for the two of them to have between gunfire, but we never get those crucial moments of connection and growth that would make me care about anybody in this farce.

Even though this movie wants to make a case that Zionists have a point and progressive protesters should shut up, this movie never makes a convincing argument with its premise. I’m reminded of how much more effectively movies like Olympus Has Fallen and Red Dawn wove their nationalistic propaganda into their brutal action; they were still goofy pieces of conservative trash, but they had just enough competency to make their vigor entertaining. That is not the case with this movie, which lazily dumps its talking points all over the place. Saunders, in a crucial scene, confronts a terrorist who mocks America for being weak with its due process and abortions (abortions are rarely mentioned up until this part of the movie). Saunders cuts off this anti-America rant with a bullet, says that’s what the country is all about, and pauses to admire his point-blank execution for several seconds, likely waiting for the conservative audience to finish applauding. Unfortunately, this film did not debut in theaters, so you’ll just have to imagine that reaction while watching at home.

The talking points are so poorly crowbarred into this picture. Consider the one scene considered so important that it has become a centerpiece of the picture’s promotion. Farrah and Bruce, two student activists, are forced onto the student union roof by Ibrahim to witness the violence spread across campus. In this moment, Ibrahim brings up how he’s going to build a world for Farrah and Bruce to have babies, but when Bruce admits he’s gay, a surprised Ibrahim immediately kicks the student off the roof. I know the point of the scene is to fulfill the tired conservative cry against gay activists, that they’d be executed in Palestine for their sexuality. But that talking point doesn’t match up with how the movie is framed. Ibrahim is meant to be surprised by Bruce’s admission, but this ISIS leader has been working on catfishing a progressive protest group that clearly boasts LGBTQ flags. Shouldn’t he have known about this? Even more baffling is that terrorists later execute a gender non-conforming student wearing makeup, and the only reason they didn’t execute this person from the start is that they wore a mask to protests. Never mind this inconsistency, the film argues. Just look at the horrific sight of a gender non-conforming student being hung up on a flagpole in the LGBTQ flag, a shot meant to evoke a nod from the conservative crowd as they remark, “That’s what you get for defending Palestine.”

The defense for such a movie might be to write it off as an exaggerated picture more enjoyable for its action than anything it has to say about America, Muslims, or progressives. But the film can’t even hold that appeal. Remember that scene I mentioned about Bruce being kicked off the roof because he’s gay? The fall lasts for several shots and is never fast enough to be convincing. The mass shooting on campus that launches the assault is a mess of fleeing people and squibs going off, lacking variety in how innocent students are obliterated. One would think there should be more goofy kills, considering how ridiculous the dialogue is framed between people being brutalized, where the security guard Terrence cracks some awful banter, dashing initial hopes of him being the most competent and likable character. The only clever kill in any of this is a scene where the fighting-back students crush a terrorist with weights and then deliver an abysmal punchline. This film is so sloppy it seems to have forgotten a pregnant faculty member cornered in her office. Her situation could’ve led to an intense scene where Terrence helps her deliver the baby amid the carnage, bringing some hope of life when surrounded by death. However, that would require competent writing, and the film instead has the birthing happen between scenes, with no complications and Terrance arriving far too late for that ideal moment.

Twenty minutes into this cartoonish picture, I imagined what it would be like to sit next to somebody who finds this film not only entertaining, but insightful. After every embarassing attempt at conservative propaganda, I want to turn to that person and ask, “You don’t believe this crap, do you?” But an hour later, my question would change. I would instead ask, with a heavy sigh, “Aren’t you tired?” Aren’t you tired of this level of Islamophobia, reheated from the 2000s, just because it’s what the Zionists ordered? Isn’t it tiring to still view progressives as blue-haired woke crybabies being the harbingers of America’s downfall? All the racism, homophobia, and absurdly dumb jingoism is barfed onto the screen between lame punchlines and poorly directed action. “Oh, are you offended?” they might ask, smiling. “Are you triggered?” No, I’m exhausted. I’m tired of this. Aren’t you tired of believing this? Aren’t you tired of hoping others will be offended? Daily Wire didn’t even pull out their artificial red carpet for this junk. The worst offense of a movie this bad is that it’s just lazy with the right-wing bile it wants to promote, never clever or thrilling enough to be the sly, rousing action picture Daily Wire hopes it will be.