‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ pays homage to WWII operatives
Ritchie’s latest, the cumbersomely titled “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is at once his “Inglourious Basterds” and also his “Dunkirk.” With his adaptation of the nonfiction book “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s
Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops” by historian and war reporter Damien Lewis, Ritchie borrows Quentin Tarantino’s winking post-modern retro style to pay homage to real-life British war heroes with the same reverence that Christopher Nolan paid to the heroes of Dunkirk.
The prolific English filmguy maker started out with cheeky crime comedies (“Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch”), and has dabbled in historical bombast (“King Arthur,” “Sherlock”), Disney remakes (“Aladdin”), contemporary dramas (“Wrath of Man,” “The Covenant”) and to diminishing returns, more recent crime comedies (“The Gentleman,” “Operation Fortune:
Ruse de Guerre”). But he finds a nice groove with this entertaining World War II not-quitecomedy. There’s a glee in the Nazi killing, and an exceptionally dry humor that is English through-and-through, but he strikes a tone that rides the line between self-serious and selfconsciously humorous.
If Tarantino uses a stylistic pastiche of 1960s and ‘70s exploitation films and spaghetti Westerns in order to rewrite history to his own liking, Ritchie borrows Tarantino’s approach to perform a kind of pulpy mythmaking and celebrate a group of under-sung real-life war heroes (who may have potentially inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond). The score by Christopher Benstead is all Ennio Morricone-style whistles and guitars.
Though it is not named as such in the film, which is heavily imagined and fictionalized with the addition of a few new characters, the script, which is by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel and Ritchie, essentially follows the 1942 secret special operations mission known as “Operation Postmaster.” Concerned about the interference of German U-boats, which had throttled the English ability to receive supplies, and military support from the United