THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2024

By the end of the prologue of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, we've seen a boarding party of Nazis brutally killed, as well as an entire German ship blown up, and the premise of the plot explained in detail twice. Co-writer/director Guy Ritchie's movie is torn between these two concerns: the action and the rationale behind that action. It almost doesn't matter that the latter takes focus for most of the movie. When the story finally gets to its climactic event, the bullet-ridden and explosion-filled sequence is just as routine as everything leading up to it.

This is unfortunate, because that opening scene seems to establish a tone of jolly, bloody fun that the rest of the movie never matches. We're thrown right into the middle of a top-secret mission during World War II. It's 1942, and Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), a properly cultivated but apparently disgraced military officer, and his ragtag team of government-sanctioned but off-the-books mercenaries are sailing from England to an island off the coast of West Africa.

We'll get to the particulars of mission, obviously, since the screenplay (by Ritchie, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, and Arash Amel) does, after all, go out of its way to tell it to us twice. That introduction, though, deserves some attention and admiration.

March-Phillips and Swedish soldier Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson) are trying to convince some German sailors that they're just ordinary fishermen, but it's not as if they're making too much of an effort. The boarding party leader scolds and yells and threatens to let fire, the sea, or bullets be the means of their deaths, but our jokey, laughing heroes have the upper hand and, with the rest of the hidden team, unleash knives and automatic gunfire on the Nazis. The team's attitude is so flippant that the humor of the scene is as satisfying as the carnage of watching Nazis get what's coming to them.

The rest of the movie, based on a true story detailed in Damien Lewis' non-fiction book, is just as flippant, though, and that results in two significant issues. First, it's tough to take the severity of this mission and its impact on the war seriously. Second, it reveals that this carefree manner is the only trick the filmmakers have to offer, and after a bit, the approach becomes repetitive and diminished.

The mission, explained to March-Phillips in a flashback and then explained by March-Phillips to his men in the very next scene, is for these commandos to sink a supply ship in a neutral harbor on that island. The supplies are for German U-boats, currently disrupting military, supply, and civilian transport across the Atlantic Ocean. If they destroy the ship, the submarines' activity will be stalled or stopped.

The plan has been concocted by a military higher-up nicknamed "M" (Cary Elwes) and his right-hand man Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox), and sure enough, the text coda explains that, indeed, March-Phillips is believed to be the inspiration for James Bond (making Cavill's performance, perhaps, the most blatant unofficial audition by an actor to become the next variation of the super-spy). The other operators include Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding), and Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), who has to be rescued from a German fortress along the way.

Already on the island are actress Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González), pretending to be a gold merchant, and Heron (Babs Olusanmoukun), who runs a casino and has earned enough trust from Nazi officials to exploit it. This narrative shifts back and forth between the two groups, as schemes are made, distractions are prepared, and information that could throw the mission into jeopardy is gathered. A lot of the plot amounts to plenty of waiting around and establishing potential complications for the mission—mainly a Nazi-aligned businessman named Luhr (Til Schweiger), who tortures people in his downtime.

Since all of the characters talk and behave in generally the same way, there's not much variety to found in or between the regular spouting of exposition—of which there's a lot. Considering how much time is devoted to explaining the particulars of the mission and how it changes at the last minute, the climax surprisingly amounts to a lot of senseless violence.

That's not a comment on a moral aspect of the action (Again, the targets are Nazis, so arguably, the sequence lets them off easy in the chaos of it). It is, though, to point out that Ritchie doesn't communicate the strategy and geography of what's happening, content to show us plenty of gunfire and increasingly large explosions instead. The only thing breaking up the repetition is Lassen, whose weapon of choice is a bow and who nabs an axe to dispatch some Nazis at one point.

Despite its obvious intentions, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare isn't nearly as fun as the filmmakers believe it to be. The effort is there, from the performances to the Spaghetti Western-inspired score, but where it counts in giving us intriguing characters and dynamic action, those efforts are minimal.

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