OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE
★★★
OUT 7 APRIL (PRIME VIDEO) / CERT TBC / 114 MINS
DIRECTOR Guy Ritchie
CAST Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Josh Hartnett, Cary Elwes, Bugzy Malone, Hugh Grant
PLOT Super-spy Orson Fortune (Statham) is hired to take down dodgy arms-dealing billionaire Greg Simmonds (Grant). In order to investigate, Orson must put together a crack team of operatives and travel to a number of exotic locations — while battling assorted goons.
PLAYING LIKE A Saturday Night Live skit about a Jason Statham spy movie comes this Jason Statham spy movie, directed by regular collaborator Guy Ritchie. The Stath plays the splendidly named Orson Fortune, a quirky loose cannon of an operative who doesn’t play by the rules of the suited and booted UK intelligenceservice honchos (Eddie Marsan, Cary Elwes) that have hired him. The script is likewise a bit of a rule-breaker, having no regard for the niceties of the English language or the believability of anything that is happening, but this isn’t necessarily a massive problem in a film this daft.
Some of what is in store is predictable (shoot-outs at airports, enthusiastic taserings, double-crossing malarky at a charity event in Cannes); some is less predictable (a robbery in which Orson Fortune sits himself down to watch a bit of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid mid-heist, specifically the ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ bicycle scene). But it’s all of a piece with the general sense of knock-about antics. For the most part, the will-this-do? energy keeps things barrelling along quite pleasantly and forgettably.
If this were a more serious film, it might seem of more consequence that this is a singularly inapt time in global politics for a bunch of the baddies to be crooked Ukrainians. In practice, this film is far too ridiculous to feel it bears any relationship to actual human beings; everything here is a cartoon.
Besides, the real villain of the piece is Hugh Grant, on absolutely gonzo form here as some sort of wealthy arms-dealer. The antagonist he so memorably played in Paddington 2, Phoenix Buchanan, was a ham actor who is eventually sent to prison, and Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre feels like fan fiction set in a world where Buchanan was later released in order to do his very best impression of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, with a soupçon of Michael Caine thrown in for good measure. It is a staggering performance; hopefully Grant will continue to gift this kind of pantomime villain to a grateful public. Typical dialogue includes a scene where, when reading out loud a password comprising various upper and lowercase letters, he goes with, “Big C — for Clit.” It’s all terribly vulgar, but the sense that no-one has scriptedited this stuff for taste or decency creates its own kind of tension.
Intriguing in a different way is Aubrey Plaza in the kind of Bond Girl-style role that Alan Partridge once described as “sexy, but I don’t trust you”. Where Grant fully commits, Plaza goes the other way, to no less entertaining effect: you can basically see her trying to get through the dialogue without corpsing. It’s oddly charming to watch. Essentially, it is a characteristically Ritchie-esque patchworkquilt of spy-movie tropes and somewhat iffy one-liners — but one that somehow, just about, all adds up to a fairly entertaining film.
VERDICT
Riper than the ripest of ripe Brie, this crime caper provides a ridiculous vehicle for the talents of pretty much everyone involved, all of whom appear to be having a splendid time. Taken on these terms, viewers probably will too.