The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

I somehow missed that this was a Guy Ritchie movie when I sat down to watch it at a buddy's house; I must have missed the "a film by" credit while trying to turn off the motion smoothing on his giant TV. But, man, is this ever a Guy Ritchie movie that was made to be watched on an oversized flatscreen in the middle of the day with the motion smoothing setting on! The comic book approach taken with this WWII story is meant to be fun and breezy in a Lets-Punch-Nazis kinda way, but it comes off as smugly ignorant. The level of historical fantasy applied to every aspect in the telling of this supposedly true story—casting, characters, dialogue, physicality, facial hair, weaponry, sex, death—is certainly consistent, but it plays so contemporary it's almost offensive. It plays less like a movie and more like watching an illiterate teenager play a video game.

The story is taken from Damien Lewis's 2014 book about Operation Postmaster, a secret mission designed to sabotage the Nazis' submarine resupply operation on the Spanish-controlled island Fernando Po. Henry Cavill stars as Gus March-Phillipps, the leader of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert British organization founded by Winston Churchill. In the end titles, the film informs us that Phillips was one of Ian Fleming's primary inspirations for the James Bond character. Of course, Fleming always maintained that Bond was an ordinary guy to whom extraordinary things happened, but, whatever; it's way more fun to have a "the next James Bond" contender like Cavill play a suave, bragadocious secret agent, right? Regardless, Fleming is a minor character in this movie, played by Freddie Fox.

Some of the more entertaining casting, if 100 times more anachronistic, includes TV star Alan Ritchson (Smallville, Blue Mountain State, Reacher) as Anders Lassen, the Danish military officer who was the only non-Commonwealth recipient of the Victoria Cross during the Second World War; and Eiza González (Baby Driver, I Care a Lot, Ambulance) as Marjorie Stewart, a British actress who trained female spies and played a key role in planning operations for the SOE. The contrast between these actors (and these fictional characters) with their real-life counterparts is so extreme it's laughable, but at least they are fun to watch.

The only actor who looks at all period accurate is Til Schweiger in the role of the sadistic SS commander, Heinrich Luhr. This fictional officer oversees the prize our heroes seek to destroy, an Italian supply ship laden with the vital cargo that enables German U-boats to submerge. Schweiger's face is instantly recognizable for his small but unforgettable role as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz in Inglourious Basterds. I don't know if his casting is meant as a tip of the hat to Quentin Tarantino's 2009 masterpiece, but regardless, the reminder seems ill-advised. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is such a blatant, lame retread of Basterds, with literally every memorable moment lifted directly from Tarantino's screenplay rather than Lewis's book, that casting someone from that movie just drives home how empty the script and direction of this movie are in comparison. But Richie doesn't stop with lifting characters, scenes, comedic situations, and key dramatic beats from Basterds; his composer, Christopher Benstead, scores the movie with a quasi-Spaghetti-Western soundtrack that also plays like a carbon copy of the real thing.

The cinematography by Ed Wild enhances the video-game quality Richie is clearly going for. This is a movie where the characters are all indestructible first-person shooters who feel no pain when they're shot and hit every target with 100 percent accuracy as if the perilous, unprecedented, off-the-books operation they're engaging in, which supposedly gave birth to modern black ops, is a game pattern they've played out dozens of times before. Much of the action occurs at night, but everything can be seen with perfect visibility, just like a video game. Has the high dynamic range of modern digital cameras eradicated the whole concept of night? Spy movies and WWII missions sure were a whole lot more exciting and suspenseful when things could happen in, ya know, darkness.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a watchable movie that delivers what it sets out to accomplish. Still, when you think of all the terrific guys-on-a-mission WWIII movies you could be watching instead, it feels a little embarrassing to have picked this one.