You know The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a Guy Ritchie film even without knowing it’s a Guy Ritchie film. That Gentleman bit of the title is the giveaway – whether it’s Holmes and Watson or the Lock, Stock lads, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Gentlemen (film and TV versions), Ritchie has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s a guy Guy. Even his most feminine sounding movie, Snatch, is all about the boys.
So the real-life story of the dude who became the template for Ian Fleming’s James Bond sounds like a good fit. And with Henry Cavill – regularly proposed as the next 007 – as Gus March-Phillips, what could possibly wrong?
Before answering that, a touch of background. The story Ritchie tells a true one. Based on the non-fiction best-seller The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops by Damien Lewis (not to be confused with the actor Damian Lewis), it tells the tale of March-Phillips and his gang of deniable banditos, how they were recruited by the Special Operations Executive during the dark days of the Second World War and then sent off to an island off the west coast of Africa to wreck the U-Boat supply chain, thus rendering Germany’s submarine fleet inoperable. “An unsanctioned, unauthorised and unofficial mission,” as Rory Kinnear’s Winston Churchill puts it – Churchill is going against the wishes of his chiefs of staff, who are just one extra thorn in the side of March-Phillips and co.
March-Phillips is not working alone. Quickly putting together a dirty half dozen of fellow desperadoes, he and his under-the-radar gang are soon on board a trawler heading for West Africa: Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding) and – once they’ve rescued him from Nazi incarceration – Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), each a man with his own set of skills, which will all come into their own in the fullness of time.
In Felix Leiter and Moneypenny roles, Babs Olusanmokun and Eiza González play March-Phillips’s inside team, arranging sabotage most underhand on the island of Fernando Po, at the same time attempting to neutralise arch Nazi Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger).
Back at base in London, Brigadier Gubbins aka M (Cary Elwes) and Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox), liaising directly with Churchill, keep the Navy top brass in the dark while steering the operation, a task made all the harder because March-Phillips and gang are the cats who will not be herded – which is precisely why they’ve been chosen for this mission in the first place.
Ritchie aims for the swagger and smirk of Kelly’s Heroes and Connery-era James Bond. Christopher Benstead’s soundtrack adds an all-you-can-eat buffet of 1960s derring-do, spaghetti western and chintzy caper pastiches. In keeping with the overall sense of the familiar, Ed Wild’s cinematography is reminiscent of mid-budget action movies of yore like The Sea Wolves or Escape to Athena. Gregory Peck or David Niven will surely be popping up at any moment.
It looks good, sounds good, the cast is what you want them to be (though Kinnear’s Churchill takes some getting used to) and the action set pieces pop. But charm can easily become smarm and the movie eventually starts to buckle under the weight of all the smirking. On top of that Ritchie cannot decide how “real” to make his guys, and so defaults to Lock, Stock stereotype.
There is some seriously bad dialogue in this movie, and it’s not much fun watching actors fighting the words they are paid to speak. Whoever thought to add a couple of references to Casablanca – not a bad line in it – deserves some sort of award, perhaps the one borrowed from whichever cast member has won the 1940s British Over-Enunciation Competition.
It’s a dud, in other words. There are cracking elements in it. The actors. Their characters. The tale itself – which is one of proper bravery in the face of serious adversity, and which Ritchie has stuck to pretty faithfully. But on top of its tin ear and its overlong and repetitious scenes, there are simply too many characters chasing too little plot. Which means most of March-Phillips’s inglorious bastards have so little to do that you’ll regularly be asking yourself, “which one are you again?”
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
