2 out of 5

Directed by: Guy Ritchie

Guy Ritchie movies, for the most part, benefit by turning your brain off before viewing. The better experiences result in solid entertainment, generally expertly shot and edited together, and with enough storytelling hand-waiving to actually require the recruitment of at least a few of those brain cells, which adds a bit of participatory flair to things. The best Ritchie experiences turn out to have a pretty solid emotional core to them, even more justifying the one-by-one turning back on of mental resources.

While I realize this sounds excessively critical, a solid flick from the director is a particularly unique experience – a film functioning as full-on popcorn nonsense and then secretly a by-all-means good movie at the same time – and one that he has managed to nail several times throughout his career, flipping between relatively scrappier productions versus largescale Disney efforts.

Of course, there are also bad Guy Ritchie movies, where Lock Stock’s existence between Tarantino love letter and inspiration for the next generation has iterated into the director doing lazy impressions of himself. ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ is a puzzling flick, as it partially commits that sin, but then also partially acts as something more attemptedly self-aware… and then partially just flops and fails and falls flat. A stacked cast and rich source material generally keep the movie afloat, but it’s a flick that either lands or it doesn’t, and how you might respond to an opening scene will tell that tale.

Before detailing that, the setup: 1941, WWII, the UK. While politicians bicker over whether or not to kowtow to Hitler, Winston Churchill (Rory McChrane) and Brigadier Colin Gubbins decide on a secret op to undermine the German’s U-Boats, paving the way for a US alliance with the UK. To lead that op, well, of course we need the most dastardly crew: so enter a heavily-bearded Gus March-Phillipps – casually acted by a heavily bearded Henry Cavill – and a motley assortment of fellas played by Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Henry Golding, and Hero Fiennes Tiffin. After a short stopover for a prison breakout, Gus and team are on their way to avoid detection on the seas, get to a guarded port, and blow up some ships – a (possible) blend of classic Ritchie heist flicks and something like The Magnificent Seven, which probably cued composer Christopher Benstead to lift from both Daniel Pemberton and Morricone, in another one of the flick’s middleground identity crises – i.e. I don’t really know what this movie is aiming for, so we’ll just pretend it’s a few different things at once.

Back to the opening scene – that of Guy’s introduction. Cavill saunters in to a dimly lit room of very official folk, and chortily accepts his Very Serious Mission, while eagerly accepting offers of drink and smokes, then taking a bit more than he was actually offered. It’s a pretty by-the-books Han Solo riff, the rakish, roguish lead, yadda yadda, but the pacing and joke timings are very oddly clunky. Ritchie lets dialogue scenes bloat, and plays them visually fairly straight, lending an aura of seriousness, but then the actual script is all chipper back-and-forth, leading to a discrepancy in how a scene is delivered versus the tone of what’s said. Additionally, the way Cavill takes / steals liquor and cigars works perfectly as a background joke to the conversation, but instead, the talk pauses, Cavill motions to what he’s doing, the camera cuts to show what he’s doing, and then someone either visually or verbally comments on it. It’s like Ritchie can’t shake the handholding of Disney filmmaking, but also can’t be indulgent enough to amp this up to camp.

If you go with the suggestion of brain retirement, the action scenes are fun. They’re well shot, though there’s a similar / opposite problem of the dialogue scenes: these are equally telegraphed, but there’s no patience to them – no time to establish scene geography, or really define what makes one sequence of shooting and stabbing different from another. Setting that aside as best you can (and the completely silent guns), that sense of fun is due to inklings of the complete B-movieness at the core of this thing, as our leads saunter into full-on German camps and just annihilate, completely invincible themselves, smiling and laughing the whole while. It’s stupid, but it feels like it’s supposed to be, and had we played that up more consistently…

Instead, the movie bloats to two hours, mistakenly trying for some classic noir intrigue and villainy with Babs Olusanmokun and Eiza González running a side op against evil nazi Heinrich, played by Til Schweiger, and while this stuff can – as most of the movie does – look pretty, the discrepancy again between page (with canned dialogue) and screen is grating, cinematographer Ed Wild equally conflicted over whether to muddy everything up in barely discernible browns and greens and greys, or use blown out colors and up the camp.