‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ Review
From Ritchie. Guy Ritchie.
THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE is Guy Ritchie’s James Bond movie.
Quite literally, in a sense: Based on Damien Lewis’s 2014 nonfiction book about Operation Postmaster, in which one Ian Fleming was a supporting player of an undercover operation designed to cripple German U-boat operations in the Atlantic in 1942, a character from The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is, supposedly, the basis of 007.
Perhaps that’s why the movie has very little sense of danger: James Bond can’t be killed! (Well, I mean. You know what I’m saying.) Look, I liked The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare well enough—it’s a pleasant time at the multiplex!—but I’ve rarely felt less tension in an action movie than in this one. At no point as Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) was marching through prison camps or Spanish-controlled docks and casually gunning people down with a silenced machine gun did I ever once think, “Hm, he’s in trouble.”
To describe the action as uninspired wouldn’t be entirely fair or completely accurate; I had fun watching the mountainous Dane Anders Lassen (played by the mountainous American Alan Ritchson) dispatch Nazis with a bow and arrow, and then just an arrow, and then an axe, keeping a gleeful smile on his face all the while. But it is terribly straightforward and a hair understated. Occasionally it dips into mild incoherence, particularly when the gunfire takes place at a distance.
“Straightforward” is the word I keep coming back to when thinking about The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. There’s something to be said for telling a story straightforwardly! After a brief prelude on a boat stopped by Nazis, we learn why the boaters are there: Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear), ‘M’ (Cary Elwes), and Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) have dispatched March-Phillips and his international team of Nazi-hating undercover killers to destroy a supply ship filled to the brim with carbon dioxide scrubbers for U-boats, which will keep them above water and out of the American and British navies’ collective hair just in time for the transport of troops training for D-Day.
Before they get to the island off the coast of Africa where the supply ship is held, they’ll have to swing by the Canaries to free Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) from a Gestapo prison camp. Aiding Mach-Phillips and his team are Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) and actress Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González), who must gather intel and distract Nazi honcho Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger) on the night of the demolition.
There are no twists and turns; there aren’t any insurmountable obstacles. Everything that happens does so as planned, more or less. The humor is as wry and understated as everything else: “You’re going to cause an upset,” a British Naval officer intones in his clipped way, nose in the air, aghast at the improper attitude of these ruffians on their secret mission. At another point, an Eton-educated pirate who also happens to be a prince and wants to be a knight says he’ll aid in opposing Luhr and his men “not because they’re Nazis, but because they’re gauche,” and his emphasis on the word gauche inspired high titters amongst my Thursday-evening audience.
It's funny not in the way that Ritchie movies like Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels are funny, which is to say that it’s not gut-busting-guffaw funny; it’s more soft-chuckle, amused-grin-as-you-settle-your-cup-of-tea-on-its-saucer funny. It’s the sort of funny that comes from a lifetime of annoyances with the prim-and-proper set who’d rather lose gracefully to the Nazis than put up an ungentlemanly fight.
Despite the title, Ritchie shoots this movie with almost gentlemanly restraint, as if he felt the need to treat the real-life heroes of Operation Postmaster with proper respect: there are few quirks of the sort we sometimes associate with him, nothing too fancy or stylized like RocknRolla or The Gentlemen, no cool split screens like in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., his previous collaboration with Cavill. The contrast between this film and Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman series—the most recent of which was set during World War I and featured, I swear this is true, a post-credits scene teasing a team-up between Lenin and Hitler—is striking; it’s almost like Ritchie’s quietly begging his former producer to tone it down a notch when dealing with the reality of war.
In short, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a fine, fun, straightforward action movie with a handful of winning performances and just enough Nazi-killing to ensure it would have been a mainstay of basic cable a decade ago.