The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Nasty Nazis get their comeuppance in a bloody adventure inspired by true events steered by Guy Ritchie at his most roguish.
Silent but deadly: Alan Ritchson as Anders Lassen, the Danish Hammer
Photo by Dan Smith, Image courtesy of Lionsgate
It’s an unwieldy title but apparently one drawn from the mouth of Winston Churchill himself. He was talking about a reckless band of renegades, hand-picked for a mission off the coast of West Africa in 1942, which led to the formation of the Black Ops. It’s an adaptation of Damien Lewis’s even more cumbersomely titled non-fiction tome Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII. Damien Lewis, not to be confused with the actor Damian Lewis, is the author of such stirring nonfiction works as Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse: The True Story of One Woman Who Risked Everything to Bring Hope to Afghanistan (2011) and Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century (2013). His first book was Slave (2004), which was adapted into a TV movie and stage play. He has a way with titles, but also with digging up shocking stories that have somehow escaped the global consciousness. This latest yarn, we are told, was “taken from Winston Churchill’s confidential files declassified in 2016.” As the undertaking was an “unsanctioned, unauthorised and unofficial” mission, word of it reaching legitimate ears would have resulted in the prime minister’s removal from office.
The British were sticklers for the rule book, but as Jerry was entirely less ethical, more clandestine measures had to be implemented behind closed doors. So, on the heels of Operation Mincemeat, we have Operation Postmaster which, in the hands of Guy Ritchie, unfolds more like The Dirty Dozen than anything John Mills might have appeared in in the 1940s. Ritchie’s inglorious bastards are headed by Gus March-Phillipps, played by Henry Cavill (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), an audacious commando who was the inspiration for James Bond. Ian Fleming himself appears in the film in the guise of Freddie Fox, following his appearance in Operation Mincemeat, where he was played by Johnny Flynn. There are stiff upper lip types galore, a motley international crew, albeit with accents you could cut with a diamond. Besides Danny Sapani’s pukka Prince of Fernando Po, there’s the Mexican Eiza González (who appears in Ritchie’s next two movies, In the Grey and Fountain of Youth) who has a blast with her English vowels as Marjorie Stewart, a sharpshooter, chanteuse and later a film actress (The Weak and the Wicked) who gets to seduce the Germans with her version of ‘Mack the Knife.’ There are a lot of knives in the movie, along with their concomitant, grisly sound effects, many wielded by Anders Lassen – aka the Danish Hammer – played by Alan Ritchson, who made his name as the knife-hating Jack Reacher in the Amazon Prime series of the same name.
While billed as an action-comedy, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a bloody and brutal affair, where the Germans have seldom appeared so dispensable. There’s a decent villain in SS commander Heinrich Luhr, who we first see laughing as he wipes the blood off his hands from the torture of a naked Nigerian woman. He is played by Til Schweiger (Inglourious Basterds) with a manic glint in his eye, who falls for the charms of González and concedes to dressing up as Julius Caesar to her Cleopatra at an improbable fancy dress beano. It's all as daft as a brush but is well paced by Ritchie with a spring in its step aided by a breezy, percussive, Morricone-inflected score courtesy of Christopher Benstead. It also feels like the beginning of a new franchise which, knowing Guy Ritchie and the success of Steven Knight’s SAS: Rogue Heroes, could well be the case.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Henry Cavill, Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Babs Olusanmokun, Henrique Zaga, Til Schweiger, Henry Golding, Cary Elwes, Freddie Fox, Rory Kinnear, Danny Sapani, James Wilby, Simon Paisley Day, Mark Oosterveen.
Dir Guy Ritchie, Pro Jerry Bruckheimer, Guy Ritchie, Chad Oman, Ivan Atkinson and John Friedberg, Screenplay Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel and Guy Ritchie, from Damien Lewis’s book Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII, Ph Ed Wild, Pro Des Martyn John, Ed James Herbert, Music Christopher Benstead, Costumes Loulou Bontemps, Sound Ben Chick, Dialect coaches Hazel Holder, William Conacher, Poll Moussoulides and Rea Nolan.
Black Bear/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Kinopoisk/Toff Guy/Red Sea Film Fund/C2 Motion Picture Group/Media Capital Technologies-Lionsgate/Amazon Prime.
120 mins. UK/USA/Turkey. 2024. US Rel: 19 April 2024. UK Rel: 25 July 2024. Cert. 16+.
