Solid action film turns real WWII story into nonsense
Guy Ritchie’s “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a little like Quentin’s Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” only stupid.
Very loosely based on history, it’s about a military unit that was created by Winston Churchill to do special operations against the Nazis in the early days of World War II. A serious movie could be made from this material, but this isn’t it. This is something else — unserious and largely fictional, but mostly enjoyable.
Ritchie takes history and, with the help of three screenwriters, reflects it through his usual funhouse mirror (“The Gentlemen,” “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”). So here, instead of career soldiers, the special ops team is made up of colorful desperadoes, paroled from prison to do a dangerous job. There are only five of them, to make it easier for us to keep track, and they’re led by Henry Cavill as Gus March-Phillips, who would be amazed to see himself portrayed as a happy-go-lucky homicidal maniac.
It makes you wonder: In the afterlife, do people get to see the movies made about them, and if so, does this only happen in hell?
The movie begins at a desperate point in the war, when German U-boat submarines were sinking half the cargo that the United States was sending to England. Churchill’s entire war Cabinet is telling him to surrender to Adolf Hitler (in truth, the Cabinet never advised that), and so Churchill, ever the innovator, hires a band of career criminals to save the civilized world.
The British prime minister is played by Rory Kinnear (“The Diplomat”), who isn’t particularly obese, which is right for this stage of the war. Churchill started off a little chubby and gained an enormous amount of weight during the war, while Franklin Roosevelt, under similar horrific pressure, got very thin. But why does Churchill have blond hair in this, why isn’t he bald, and why does he look exactly like Gert Frobe, the James Bond villain in “Goldfinger”?
Ritchie can create a sense of fun, but he has a hard time figuring out what points to emphasize so the audience can follow a story. He’s more a director of incidents than of movies, but for the first half at least, the incidents are entertaining. There’s an early sequence in which Nazis attempt to take charge of a fishing boat held by March-Phillips and his men, which gets the movie off to a lively start. And throughout, the far-fetched action sequences engage our interest.
Basically, the movie shows us two centers of action. On a Spanish island, two spies — Marjorie (Eiza Gonzalez), a glamorous Jewish woman, and a man known as Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) — are working to sabotage the oil reserves that supply the German U-boat fleet. Meanwhile, March-Phillips and his men lurk offshore, ready to lead the attack once things start blowing up.
Watching Gonzalez flirt and manipulate the Nazi officer on the island (Til Schweiger) is fun to watch, though one begins to wonder why anyone undercover would choose to be so flamboyant. This highlights the general problem of “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” — it doesn’t quite make sense.
You might reasonably ask, “Who cares if it makes sense?” And I might answer, “That’s true. I don’t, either.” But the movie’s loose, trivial quality cuts it off from anything that might have given its story urgency. We see Cavill going around killing people with a devilmay-care insouciance that would make John Wick look like a pacifist, and it’s hard to remember what all this has to do with U-boats and the fate of Western democracy.
In the end, this is not really a World War II movie. It’s just a pretty good action film that borrows the plot from about three or four “Fast and Furious” movies, while stealing riffs from Tarantino.
At one point, a German officer says that only Germans and Jews have the slyness of a fox. That’s like something Christoph Waltz might have said in the first scene of “Inglourious Basterds,” but for the fact that Tarantino is too good a writer for that.