War Games
RiTchie’s gonna Ritchie… but a little more delicately this time.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Director: Guy Ritchie • Writers: Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie, based on the book by Damien Lewis
Starring: Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Eiza González, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Til Schweiger, Babs Olusamokun, Henry Golding
UK • 2hrs
Opens Hong Kong April 18 • IIB
Grade: B
Guy Ritchie is very much a guy. His movies are about guys doing guy things and talking like guys. The girls in his movies always stick out like a sore thumb, for better (Michelle Dockery in The Gentlemen) and worse (Aubrey Plaza in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre in which, admittedly, everyone was shite). He’s like Michael Bay with more self-awareness, occasionally inspired snappy, snarky banter and less reliance on boom-boom – though he does like some good action.
Ritchie fuses most of those sensibilities together, including the snarky bantering among the, uh, guys, in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, based on the exploits of the stranger-than-fiction covert unit recounted in Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII. First things first: Ritchie and his co-writers set out to make a romp that shed a little light on a long forgotten slice of war history (until declassification in 2016). As such, the anachronistic dialogue, weapons and clothes, and playing fast and loose with history are clear creative choices, so if you’re looking to Guy Ritchie to be your Second World War source, you’ve got bigger problems. Still, this is minor key Ritchie with oodles of beefcake (co-star Alan Ritchson is HUGE), and while it’s not among his best, it’s diverting enough, and the strong parts are really strong. And we can ever have too much Nazi murder?
The boys in the band
TMoUW is very simple and taps as many wartime thriller conventions as it can, starting with the old chestnut of getting the specialised, heist-y band back together for a special mission (which the film suggests is the first of many) to sink an Italian freighter, the Duchessa, carrying the materials powering the German U-boat programme. The same programme causing havoc in the Atlantic and keeping the Americans out of the war. Navy bigshots Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes) and budding writer Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) spring super-agent (?) Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill) out of prison for the task: Operation Postmaster. It’s off the books, officially unsanctioned and Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) has total deniability. If the British catch them in the act, they’re going to jail. Germans catch them, they’re dead.
March-Phillipps, of course, needs his own team for the job, which includes Danish killing machine Anders Lassen (Ritchson), explosives expert Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding), and a pair of intelligence pros on the ground in Fernando Po, in West Africa, Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and Mr Heron (Babs Olusanmokun). The squad heads to supply depot, where they outwit head Nazi Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger) and throw a wrench in the Germans’ plans.
Some are going to take exception to Ritchie making WWII into the stuff of adventure and excitement, but TMoUW is just as concerned with entertainment as it is with shining a light on super-secret SAS-adjacent ops. There’s also a touch of British exceptionalism slipped in between the folds of brutal violence and weaponised sex appeal. But this is Ritchie Lite because the stakes feel so low. Sure, the fate of the free world may be at stake, but it rarely feels as if Gus, Freddy and Anders are in danger of failure, that they won’t be able to outwit the Admiralty or that Marjorie and Heron’s cover will be irreparably blown. This is the least tense global conflict ever put on film.
That said, everyone seems to be having a grand time playing killer spy. Cavill has an almost supernatural understanding of roguish charm even if he struggles to telegraph inner conflict and insecurity, but the rest of the gang manages to build a dynamic among each other that keeps the film from succumbing to its messier tendencies. Bonus points go to Ritchson for his gay chit chat with Golding and boisterous murder mayhem that might rival Jack Reacher’s. This isn’t the kind of finely tuned exercise in gangster machismo told in colourful, rat-a-tat metaphors that made Ritchie famous, but the scenery is pretty and the caper is ludicrously executed. It’s close enough. —DEK