The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare review — Let's kill some Nazis

Directed by Guy Ritchie | Written by Ritchie, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, and Arash Amel, based on the book by Damien Lewis | 120 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime

Guy Ritchie grew up watching the same movies I did, which is why I have a soft spot for him.

There’s not a chance in hell he hasn’t seen Where Eagles Dare, Ffolkes aka North Sea Hijack, Force 10 From Naverone, or The Wild Geese. They’re Men on a Mission movies — international tales of roguish dudes looking to blow something up for a good cause. These movies used to be a big part of action cinema, and that’s what Ritchie is going for here.

But unlike, say, Operation Mincemeat, from a couple years back, which is based on an adjacent slice of history from the spymasters’ perspective, Ritchie always has his tongue planted in his cheek. Any effort to genuinely recreate the era or have his movie driven by characters we end up caring about, that’s not really on his radar. He wants everyone looking good and the action to hit hard, and in that he succeeds.

His story is based in recently revealed files about something called Operation Postmaster, where a group of hard men who sailed out on a wartime mission under orders directly from Winston Churchill. They floated on down to Fernando Po, a Spanish-controlled island off the west coast of Africa, to destroy a Nazi supply ship in an effort to cripple the Atlantic U-Boat fleet.

The mission men: Henry Cavill, sporting an excellent handlebar moustache in place of a personality, Alan Ritchson, TV’s Reacher doing a passible Scandinavian accent and convincing as a lover of knives, Henry Golding as the mysterious one, Hero Fiennes Tiffin as the Irish one, and Alex Pettyfer as the pretty one. Ahead of them are two spies played by Babs Olusanmokun, recently of Dune and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Eiza González, terrific in Baby Driver and I Care A Lot and the only woman with a line of dialogue in this movie.

Rounding out the impressive cast is Til Schweiger as the main Nazi, Freddie Fox as *that* Ian Fleming, Danny Sapani as both African royalty and a pirate, Cary Elwes as a Cary Elwes character, and the usually great Rory Kinnear totally miscast as Churchill and let down by the make-up.

I wish I could give you more details about these characters, but I really can’t. In The Wild Geese we got to spend a little time with Roger Moore, Richard Harris, and Richard Burton before they went to Africa, and those moments gave us a sense of who they were and what they wanted. The personal stakes here are entirely absent except for, “Let’s kill some Nazis,” which I suppose isn’t a bad thing. We also get echoes of Inglourious Basterds and Raiders of the Lost Ark — may as well steal from the best.

González and Olusanmokun make a decent double act, but there’s no suspense around their various machinations on Fernando Po, so the fun loiters in early action sequences and later ones, with a lot of draggy bits through the middle. Ritchie doesn’t do anyone any favours by shooting a lot of this like a 1990s TV series — lots of shots in the middle distance and little in the way of imagination.