“Remember, gentlemen,” says Henry Cavill’s Gus March-Phillipps in The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, “try to have fun.” It is an instructive line. This is a very silly kind of war film, an action comedy with only a tangential, Wikipedia-skim-read level of historical reality. It is extremely loosely based on the real Operation Postmaster, the daring off-books operation which saw a crack team of commandos steal enemy warships from the Germans.
In the midst of a prolific streak, we find director Guy Ritchie here in less geezer-gangster mood, more The Man From U.N.C.L.E. mode. Not to say that there aren’t Ritchie-isms to be found. The colourful ensemble is introduced with a montage you could describe as Snatch-ian, introducing characters such as Henry Golding’s Freddy ‘Frogman’ Alvarez, or Alan Ritchson’s hard bastard Anders Lassen.
The director keeps things energetic and breezy, with at least one cool-guys-don’t-look-at-explosions moment.
But there’s an odd mish-mash of tones. The stakes, it is frequently suggested, are huge. This mission supposedly could turn the tide of the war. Yet the film is essentially a playful caper. In some places, Christopher Benstead’s jaunty score sounds like an Ennio Morricone impression, seemingly summoning the gory-fantasy World War II found in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
When it comes to Nazis, Ritchie seems to follow the Indiana Jones philosophy: that they are the ultimate villains, and therefore fair game as cannon-fodder. (Never mind that the real mission involved zero casualties.) Ritchie’s action has an ultraviolent video-game approach to it: one furtive mission is literally described by Cavill’s character as “stealth mode”, hardly 1940s vernacular. Still, the director keeps things energetic and breezy, with at least one cool-guys-don’t-look-at-explosions moment. Those cool guys are rarely in much danger, though.
Of the ensemble, Cavill is in fine fettle, pitching his proto-007 English charm to just the right level; Til Schweiger, as Nazi big bad Heinrich Luhr, is eminently hissable. Some are badly miscast, mind: Rory Kinnear sadly joins the ever-swelling ranks of cinematic Winston Churchill cartoonish cosplayers. Eiza González, meanwhile, as the only female character here, is also unfairly lumped with a script that believes a woman’s primary quality is in her ability to seduce men.
So, it is far from perfect, careless not only with its history and its characters but its structure (at two hours, it feels sloppy). But its arrival straight to streaming seems appropriate: this is a perfectly undemanding watch. Just don’t watch it with a historian.
