Henry Cavill and Alan Ritchson star in Guy Ritchie’s unapologetically old-school macho adventure The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – streaming on Prime Video from July 25. You’ll have a blast. Literally, Adam Fresco says of the explosion, bullet and grenade-filled pic.
Take a classic boys’ own adventure, a dollop of heroic comic-book tales of Allies battling Nazis, and a whole heap of wildly over-the-top poetic license and you have Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. With former Man of Steel Henry Cavill and TV’s Reacher, Alan Ritchson, it’s a bold, brash and bombastic take on those star-studded action war flicks of the 1960s. The ones that screened repeatedly on television sets way back in the days before streaming platforms, digital TV, or even videotape.
Ritchie wears his filmic influences proudly on his sleeves with hints of Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson in 1963’s The Great Escape, a smattering of Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland in 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, and a dash of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood in 1968’s Where Eagles Dare. It’s all there, from the burly stars quipping wisecracks as they fearlessly take down the ever-so-bad guys, to the heroic exploits of the elite fighting few, saving the many by striking behind enemy lines like ninja (only far louder, and less subtle, with submachine guns and grenades in place of silent stealth).
That’s right. It’s no more-Mr-Nice-Guy for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (played with relish by British character actor and Bond movie regular Rory Kinnear), who has resolved: “If Hitler isn’t playing by the Rules, then neither shall we.” Hence the ungentlemanly bit of the title, because this supposedly “based on”, “inspired by”, and “sort-of-true” fiction relies on the good guys not playing according to the laws of cricket. Licensed to kill, wreak havoc and generally break the rules, the team assembles and prepares to go behind enemy lines to punch, kick, stab, shoot, blow up, and generally disrupt the Nazi war machine.
The tale is ostensibly based on historian Damien Lewis’s book, which has the try-and-say-the-whole-title-in-one-breath-without-passing-out title of: “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops.” Whilst the film pilfers both the book’s name and the basic gist of the real Operation Postmaster plot to secrete special forces behind German lines, it pretty much discards hard historical fact in favour of the type of old-school action, comedy, violence, and adventure that’s not a million clicks away from Sean Connery’s Bond.
In fact, Bond author, and real-life spy, Ian Fleming (played with a knowing meta wink to the audience by Freddie Fox) is one of the characters, as is the historically accurate Brigadier Gubbins (played by Cary Elwes), who, under his codename ‘M’, recruits Gus March-Phillips, (in the hulking yet friendly form of Henry Cavill), to form the crew tasked with sabotaging the deadly German U-boats threatening to cut-off Britain’s essential supplies.
Gus assembles a crack crew of submarine saboteurs, including Danish naval hero Anders Lassen (in the muscled guise of Alan Ritchson), and Freddy Alvarez (played by Henry Golding, of Crazy Rich Asians fame, and a star of Ritchie’s gangsters-meet-aristocrats movie The Gentlemen). There are a few female characters, but for the most part, Guy Ritchie’s pic is an unapologetically old-school macho adventure. That said, Eiza González gives her character Marjorie Stewart some sparkle, but elsewhere it remains a resolutely masculine affair, with a solid supporting cast including German Inglorious Basterds actor Til Schweiger, Babs Olusanmokun, and Alex Pettyfer.
There are all the usual directorial flourishes you’d expect from the creator of flicks from Snatch to Sherlock Holmes, so suspend your inner historian, say farewell to accuracy, and embrace the testosterone-fuelled boys-playing-war of it all. You’ll have a blast. Literally. I mean, there are enough explosions, bullets fired, and grenades launched to rival a 1980s Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger double-bill. Ultimately, in just that Rambo goes Commando kinda-way, that’s where Ritchie’s latest sits, tongue firmly in its cheek, as it plays like an old school war movie, retooled for a PlayStation generation, by way of a Fast and Furious movie, only set in the early 1940s.
From lush Turkish locations to the unrelenting pace, there’s a lot to like, and while the cast may not be too challenged by the characters they’re playing, all involved are clearly having a ball. Fortunately, it’s a sense of fun that proves infectious, in a cheeky chaps in violent combat sort of way. Let loose from his Kryptonian cape, and the wig he wore in The Witcher, Cavill has fun, flexing his comedy chops as well as his biceps just as assuredly as he did in Ritchie’s film, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
It’s a fun ride that should keep fans of action movies, wartime capers, and beefcake actors Cavill and Ritchson more than happy as they and their fellow gentlemen act in the most ungentlemanly way, dispatching melodramatic Nazis with a violent glee I’ve not seen since James Gunn took on The Suicide Squad. Often funny, and cartoonishly violent, it keeps the action hurtling forward at a breakneck pace, just fast enough to jump over the numerous plot holes and historical errors in a way that action movie fans won’t find distracting.
