Mark Reviews Movies: OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 1, 2023

The central aim of Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre has little to do with its plot, which revolves around a MacGuffin that remains unspecified until the third act, or its action, which is regularly interrupted and returned to later. Co-writer/director Guy Ritchie's spy movie is counting on the personalities of its characters and the charms of its actors to carry it. While those actors certainly do their best to try to convince us that these characters have more to them than hopping the globe in search of some whatsit, the movie itself never rises above the level of a generic thriller with some bits of comedy sprinkled into the mix.

That's a shame, too, especially because of the actors Ritchie has gathered for the material. The head of this covert team, which runs top-secret missions for the UK government in an off-the-books capacity, is played by Jason Statham, an actor who oozes as much charisma as he does tough-guy swagger.

We know the drill of that persona by now, and Ritchie doesn't want the actor to do much more than to play it again. Well, there are a couple of gags accompanying this particular character, such as the fact that this remorseless agent of violence is a wine connoisseur and that his code name is Orson Fortune. One hopes the rhyming name is a jokey matter of the trade, that is, or maybe it helps to explain how the guy ended up expecting a fight everywhere he goes. Either way, Ritchie is really stretching just with the name to give us a sense of quirkiness right from the start.

The real start of the plot involves a heist at a research facility outside of Johannesburg, where a team of armed mercenaries stole an unknown device of great worth and capable of some terrible but unknown consequences. So much of the screenplay by Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, and Marn Davies lets us know that we shouldn't focus on or care too much about what this thing is, what it can do, and to what specific end a group of assorted bad guys might use it.

For a story that is more about its characters, that's the right attitude for the screenwriters to possess. As for how well they pull of the trick of putting character and tone over plotting, the third act spells out what the thing is, what it can do, and exactly how one group of villains plans to use it for nefarious ends. It's not really a trick, in other words. It's just the usual, dressed up with a little style.

Fortune is called into action by his regular handler Nathan (Cary Elwes), who works for one of the intelligence branches of the government (Eddie Marsan plays the boss' boss). As an independent contractor, Fortune does what the government doesn't want on the official record, and in addition to the expensive wine, he wants the best private jets, hotel rooms, and other amenities—whether or not he's on a mission.

That's pretty much the joke for him. As for the rest of the team, we meet Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza), a communications specialist with a sarcastic manner and a habit for double entendre, and JJ Davies (Bugzy Malone), who's introduced as a sort of jack-of-all-trades for spy craft but spends a good amount of time staring through the scope of a rifle. Basically, they're not much better in terms of overshadowing the movie's routine with the power of their characterizations.

To be fair, Ritchie and his fellow writers do give us some snappy dialogue, which offers the illusion that there's more to these characters than some broad attitude, and a fairly clever core of the narrative. It involves the team enlisting the aid of Danny Francesco (John Hartnett), a big-time movie star, to find out who's buying and selling the MacGuffin. The sale revolves around Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), an international arms dealer and conceited billionaire who's the biggest fan of Danny and his movies. Grant is amusing as the amoral but charming sort-of villain. Meanwhile, Hartnett brings enough sincerity to the movie star, who wants to do the right thing and finds himself increasingly intoxicated by the game of being a spy, that it's too bad the screenplay doesn't seem to know what to do the character after a while.

That's mostly because the movie becomes far too busy with the plotting, which includes some Eastern European terrorists and a couple of tech moguls and Fortune's competition in the independent-spy game, to do much with these characters. Traveling across the world (Los Angeles, Cannes, and Turkey are among the stops), the team gets to play coy to discover information, before following targets and getting into fights with others—the usual and nothing more or less.

It all builds toward a series of larger action sequences, including a car chase, some shootouts, and a series of explosions, and the strangest thing, perhaps, about Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is that even Ritchie seems impatient with this story. It comes to an end quite suddenly, before setting up the possibility of a sequel. It's almost as if the filmmaker hopes he might do better on a second attempt.

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