Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Review – Let’s Kill Some Nazis

Directed by Guy Ritchie | Written by Ritchie, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson and Arash Amel, based on the book by Damien Lewis | 120 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime

Guy Ritchie watched the same movies as me as a kid, which is why I have a soft spot for him.

There’s no way he didn’t see it Where eagles dare, people also known as Hijacking in the North Sea, force 10 from Naveroneor The wild geese. These are Men on a Mission movies — international stories about villainous guys who want to blow something up for a good cause. These movies used to be a big part of the action movie scene, and that’s what Ritchie is going for here.

But unlike, let’s say, Operation Mincemeat, from a few years ago, that’s based on an adjacent piece of history, except from the spymasters’ perspective, Ritchie has always kept his tongue in his cheek. Any attempt to truly recreate the era or have his film be driven by characters we ultimately care about isn’t really on his radar. He wants everyone to look good and the action to hit hard, and he succeeds.

His story is based on recently released files about something called Operation Postmaster, in which a group of tough guys went on a war mission under the direct orders of Winston Churchill. They drifted to Fernando Po, a Spanish-controlled island off the west coast of Africa, to destroy a Nazi supply ship in an attempt to cripple the Atlantic U-boat fleet.

The men on the mission: Henry Cavill, who sports a protruding handlebar moustache in lieu of a personality, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, TV’s Reach a passable Scandinavian accent and convincing as a knife enthusiast, Hero Fiennes Tiffin as the Irish and Alex Pettyfer as the handsome. In front of them are two spies played by Babs Olusanmokun, recently of Dune And Star Trek: Strange New Worldsand Eiza González, who really impressed in Hitman and the only woman with dialogue in this film.

The impressive cast is completed by Til Schweiger as the lead Nazi, Freddie Fox as *that* Ian Fleming, Danny Sapani as both African royalty and a pirate, Cary Elwes as a Cary Elwes character and the normally great Rory Kinnear, who is completely miscast as Churchill and let down by the makeup.

I wish I could give you more details about these characters, but I really can’t. In The wild geese We spent some time with Roger Moore, Richard Harris and Richard Burton before they went to Africa, and those moments gave us a sense of who they were and what they wanted. The personal stakes here are completely absent, other than, “Let’s kill some Nazis,” which I guess is not a bad thing. We also get echoes of inglorious bastards And Raiders of the Lost Ark —you might as well steal from the best.

González and Olusanmokun make a decent duo, but there’s no tension surrounding their various machinations on Fernando Po, so the fun is stuck in the early action scenes and later ones, with plenty of dragging stretches in the middle. Ritchie does no one any favors by filming much of this like a ‘90s TV serial – lots of medium-length shots and little in the way of imagination.

That said, with such a charismatic cast, it’s worth sticking around to see what they get up to. The explosions, when they come, are certainly nice.