The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - Review

Rating: 3 out of 5

WITH The Covenant, Guy Ritchie proved himself capable of delivering a hard-hitting war film that took sensitive aim at the handling of Afghan interpreters during the war in that country. Sadly, he doesn't bring those same sensibilities to World War II drama, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Rather, the British filmmaker opts for an approach more akin to the one employed by Quentin Tarantino in Inglorious Basterds, rather than the truth behind the real-life Operation Postmaster.

The resulting film is predictably mixed: taken as a boys' own action-adventure complete with highly stylised Ritchie vision, then the film has some merit and more than a little charm.

But if you're at all bothered by the ability it has to pay tribute to the real-life heroes depicted, then it feels blokey, glib and more than a little too self-satisified.

The story follows the fortunes of a rag-tag group of mercenaries, employed by Winston Churchill, as they head to west Africa to sabotage Nazi U-boats and allow an opportunity for America to cross the Atlantic and so enter the war.

Based on Damien Lewis’s 2014 book Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII, the story finds the team - led by Henry Cavill's Gus March-Phillips, tasked with sinking a Nazi ship with a crucial load of supplies and ammunition: the problem being that the ship in question is moored on the Spanish island of Fernando Po, a neutral territory. If they were caught, Spain could enter the war on Germany's side.

Included in the team of unruly agents are Reacher’s Alan Ritchson (as a bow and arrow wielding killing machine with an axe to grind, quite literally, against the Nazis), Alex Pettyfer and Henry Golding, while helping from the island itself are two further spies: Babs Olusanmokun's Mr Heron and Eiza Gonzalez's Marjorie Stewart.

Standing in their path is a vast array of Germans, led by Til Schweiger's sinister Heinrich Luhr.

The ensuing mission has elements of truth kept intact, albeit with a vastly exaggerated body count, a first part to the mission that didn't exist and several fictionalised characters, as well as people that weren't really there. But then why let the facts get in the way of an explosive blockbuster?

Alas, Ritchie also falls a little foul of the rules of this genre too. For despite bringing plenty of bang for his buck, the movie feels strangely devoid of tension for such a high stakes mission, with Cavill and co deployed merely to spray as many bullets and kill as many Nazis as possible, while visibly having fun. There is very little sense of jeopardy.

What does exist in that department is confined largely to the cat-and-mouse game employed between Gonzalez and Schweiger, which has a German-Jew and male-female dynamic underpinning it, to add to the creepiness. And it's in these exchanges that Ritchie really leans into Tarantino's penchant for tricky word-play, borrowing heavily from Inglorious Basterds.

Alas, Schweiger proves no match for Christoph Waltz in the villainy stakes, while the word and mind games pale by comparison to those employed in Basterds, with Michael Fassbender's sequence inside a bar coming to mind as a better example that Ritchie has borrowed without learning from.

Likewise, the rogues on a mission element feels obviously indebted to the likes of The Dirty Dozen and Suicide Squad, without ever delivering on the sense of loss or peril of either of those films.

This isn't to say that The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is terrible: merely frustrating and a missed opportunity.

It looks good, the cast is amiable enough and the action is well handled - as you would expect from a Ritchie production.

But this is very much a case of Ritchie on auto-pilot, more on the level of Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre or Aladdin than pushing the envelope for himself, a la The Convenant or Wrath of Man, or even excelling in his comfort zone like The Gentlemen or Sherlock Holmes 1 and 2.

The overall result is a glib, polished war movie that passes the time, rather than leaving anything indelible on the memory. But then given the real-life story behind it, that feels a little more remiss from all involved.