Rated R. At AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay and suburban theaters.

In a weird throwback to those Chuck Norris “Missing in Action “ films of the 1980s, “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” a far better-made effort, is yet another war movie that asks us to feel good about something we should feel bad about. In this case, it is the way that the United States has treated Afghan interpreters and their families, who are now at great risk because visas promised to them have not been made available as promised, and the Afghans and their families are at great risk from the resurgent Taliban. While we were able to drive the Taliban back, the Afghan forces can’t fight the insurgents alone. Our chaotic withdrawal made matters worse.

In fact, there was a recent story in the news headlined “Afghans Stranded in Pakistan Are Struggling After Broken Promises from the U.S.” How do we compare this reality with the content of “The Covenant,” a film about the heroic Sgt. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), an experienced and highly-trained fighter in Afghanistan in 2018 with a loving wife (Emily Beecham) and two small children back home. After the death of his previous interpreter in an I.E.D. explosion, John carefully acquires a new one named Ahmed (the imposing and impressive Iraqi actor Dar Salim, “Game of Thrones”).

Ahmed has a beautiful, young and pregnant wife named Basira (Fariba Sheikhan), whom the Taliban threaten to “feed to the dogs.” Ahmed is not good at taking orders, thinks he knows more about fighting than John and his soldiers (he might) and he hates the Taliban because they killed his son.

In order to avoid making “The Covenant” look like a blatant “white savior drama,” screenwriters Ivan Atkinson (“The Gentlemen”), Marn Davies (“Wrath of Man”) and Ritchie (“Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre”), not exactly men known for writing realistic war movies, set “The Covenant” up as a tale about how Kinley owes such as astronomical debt to Ahmed for Ahmed’s superhuman rescue of the wounded Kinley in the wild, that he could never pay that debt back entirely.

Thus, the first two thirds of the film set up that enormous debt. After a disastrous attack on Kinley’s squad, which seeks out I.E.D. factories in the vast, rocky Afghan wild (the film was shot in Alicante, Spain) and the wounding of Kinley, Ahmed and Kinley are hunted by faceless warlords who want them captured alive. Ahmed essentially carries Kinley over the Afghan mountains on a wooden sledge at great risk to them both. To ease the agony of his wounds, John will even smoke opium. In the final rescue fight, Ritchie cannot resist having a cocky American mercenary order a “Spectre Gunship” to demonstrate the blowing-bodies-to-bits superiority of American firepower, a sour gesture. Captions used at the end of “The Covenant” tell us of the dire plight of “thousands” of remaining interpreters and leave the impression for the gullible that the feel-good story we just watched is true. It is not. The faces you see in photos of real-life interpreters and soldiers are not pictures of rescued interpreters like the fictional Ahmed. They are among the approximately 78,000 men with families whom we left behind.

(“Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” contains extreme violence, drug use and profanity)