They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Guy Ritchie doing his best Quentin Tarantino impression. This may be a poor man’s Inglorious Basterds, but its sleek Richie-fication of true WW2 events offer enough popcorn entertainment to be a worthy endeavour.
Based on Winston Churchill’s recently declassified documents from the Second World War, the movie follows a team of mercenaries as they attempt to take out a fleet of German U-boats. Henry Cavill leads this band of gentlemen (and a lady) as they make their way through Nazi encampments, dropping bodies like it’s going out of style. There are several different pieces of the plan that need to align in order to achieve success, as the film jumps between various stages of their top secret mission.
This is a Guy Ritchie movie, after all, so it’s chock full of all the witty banter you’d expect. The men are suave, the women are seductive, and the chemistry amongst the cast is solid. There’s a lot of flashy fluff in place of actual plot progression. My wife was around for the first half hour and final 40 minutes, missing almost an entire hour in the middle. Despite that, she was able to piece together the plot pretty easily - which says a lot about how much padding there is in the story. Still, Ritchie does a fairly good job at keeping the ball rolling in the pacing department, allowing it to feel a lot more brisk than it is.
The action is fast and loud, with more precision kills than you can shake a stick at. Seriously, the Gentlemen have deadly accuracy that I can only describe as “the opposite of a Stormtrooper’s”. The combat is well shot and the bullets actually feel like they make an impact. Considering the production budget was a modest 60 million, everything looks and sounds like the money was spent wisely.
The Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare is bound to be your dad’s new favourite action movie, but you might wanna check it out yourself too. It’s a lot of flash and filler, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a lot of fun too. It’s streaming now on Prime Video.
3.5/5