VERDICT: Guy Ritchie displays his usual skill at stylized violence, cheeky repartee, and bespoke costuming, but the build-up in this WWII action saga outshines the climax.
The true story of a squadron of British outcasts sent to sabotage Hitler’s fleet of U-boats fits comfortably within the wheelhouse of Guy Ritchie, allowing the filmmaker to indulge all his favorite tropes: witty, devil-may-care, square-jawed heroes inflicting heavy doses of violence while dressed like they’re on their way to a fashion-mag photo shoot.
Audiences who buy a ticket to The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare for the Ritchie-isms will get their money’s worth; no Nazi is stabbed once when he can be stabbed seven times by a wisecracking hero. Those less enamored of banter amidst spurting blood may find their attention flagging well before the film reaches its nighttime action-heist climax, which presents a lighting situation that obscures most of the moving pieces involved.
World War II, with its clear-cut heroes and villains and old-school action set pieces, remains catnip for filmmakers nearly 80 years after V-J Day. Still, Ritchie manages to find a new wrinkle in the in-which-we-serve playbook, adapting Damien Lewis’ 2014 non-fiction book about a mission that remained secret until portions of Winston Churchill’s papers were declassified.
The film opens with Great Britain taking a beating by sea and by air, with the Luftwaffe blitzing London as U-boats sink ships, interrupt supply chains, and — most importantly — keep the U.S. from landing forces. Churchill (Rory Kinnear) colludes with intelligence officers Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox, The Great) and Brigadier Gubbins, aka “M” (Cary Elwes), on a hush-hush plan: a team of experts will be sent to the African port of Fernando Po to sink a supply ship and two tugboats that provide oxygen and other reinforcements for the U-boat fleet, thus crippling the stealthy submarines and allowing the Allies to get an advantage.
To lead this unofficially sanctioned mission, M recruits the currently incarcerated Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), who already has a squad in mind: strategist and spy Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer); munitions expert Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding); seasoned seaman Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin, The Woman King); and enthusiastic Nazi-killer Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson, Reacher).
With the help of a pair of undercover agents — nightclub owner Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, Dune: Part Two) and woman-of-all-trades Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González, 3 Body Problem) — this merry band hopes to pop in, sink the ships, and depart. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, however, and as the crew thinks on its feet to contend with new complications, the clock is ticking — and not just on the time bomb that Heron has planted in the power station.
Ministry works best when it chucks history out the window and leans into cinematic silliness. It’s highly unlikely that the real Marjorie (before the closing credits, we get to see pictures of her and the other real-life figures presented here) sang a slinky, bilingual version of “Mack the Knife” to seduce and distract a wicked Nazi (played here by Til Schweiger), but it’s a musical performance that perfectly counterpoints a planting-the-charges-and-shooting-the-soldiers montage from Ritchie’s go-to editor James Herbert. (That González’s rendition owes more to Jessica Rabbit than Marlene Dietrich speaks to this movie’s commitment, or lack thereof, to 1940s realness.)
The fun of Ritchie’s movies comes from watching impossibly beautiful people wearing perfectly curated outfits — Henry Cavill turns the leather trenchcoat into the season’s must-have accessory for gay bar daddies — stabbing and shooting people when they’re not flirting outrageously with each other, and their’s no shortage of those moments. Ritchson is given to wearing clingy white Henleys over his exaggerated musculature, suggesting he’s auditioning for a Popeye remake, while Kinnear seems to be having far more fun playing Churchill than Gary Oldman ever did, Oscar or not.
With all the elaborate setup involved in getting the movie to the Fernando Po mission, the action gets lost in dense darkness; cinematographer Ed Wild (Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant) doesn’t quite split the difference involved in portraying night but still allows viewers to make out exactly what’s happening. It’s a disappointing finale to what’s been a mostly breezy movie, albeit one where countless faceless bad guys are shot or stabbed or arrowed with blithe disregard.
Whether or not this “How I Won the War” narrative has any historical validity is beside the point, and this team of writers seems mostly to understand that fact, prioritizing quips, combat, and casual separates above all else. In a historical era where some viewers need to be reminded that Nazis were terrible and deserved to be obliterated from the global stage, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is as rousing a piece of propaganda as was ever crafted during the war itself.
