A larky James Bond replacement reminds us of political purpose.
To paraphrase W. C. Fields in The Fatal Glass of Beer, Guy Ritchie’s films “ain’t no place for women or gals, but pretty men go thar.” The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare features Ritchie’s usual assortment of hunks who kill and rob — extending from the Cockney gangsters in his earlier films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and RocknRolla. But this time Ritchie reenacts a covert British military maneuver — killing and robbing Nazis — that Winston Churchill commanded at the start of World War II, according to files declassified in 2016.
This comic treatment of the Second World War can’t be taken seriously, but it’s far more enjoyable than Quentin Tarantino’s revolting WWII fantasy Inglourious Basterds. Initially a Tarantino clone, Ritchie once again outclasses Tarantino (the spaghetti-Western music score is a tip-off), as he did in the terrific RocknRolla and his spies-on-a-catwalk movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Though no more realistic than a QT debauch or Matthew Vaughn’s ludicrous Kingsman franchise, Ritchie’s movie refashions such adolescent sadism so that this patriotic violence feels larky.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is definitively British (the title echoing Graham Greene, Len Deighton, and John le Carré), whereas Inglourious Basterds was never expressly American, just perverse. Tarantino updated war movie savagery — cruelly exploiting the Holocaust — without any specific feeling for American morality or offense. (Brad Pitt using a baseball bat for a bludgeon was merely an idiotic convenience, trashing a national pastime.)
Here, Ritchie’s war heroes are led by Henry Cavill as the real-life Gustavus Henry (“Gus”) March-Phillipps, sporting a woolly Van Dyke beard that evokes King Charles I, but ditching stiff-upper-lip tradition. He’s a natural leader for a gang of assassins — Danish muscleman Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), and Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding). Tasked with destroying Hitler’s U-boats, they enlist a few allies: gorgeous German-Jewish spy Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and an African named Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) who is a counterpart of Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca. (“Everyone loves my parties,” boasts the Third World bon vivant.)
Ritchie always throws a party, being of a generation impervious to war and social responsibility, yet his film savvy evokes mano a mano and explosive classics, from The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone to the Reagan-Bush era Indiana Jones films. Ritchie’s war-movie fantasies disarm Millennial apathy.
In cultural terms, Ritchie has resurrected Britain’s James Bond series at a time when the actual franchise has lost its purpose. (Bond creator Ian Fleming, played by Freddie Fox, shows up at a Downing Street security meeting.) Through such quasi-jingoism, Ritchie depicts WWII conflict as a movie buff’s caprice. (An aerial shot of the London Blitz glowing at night could be a video game.) This is where Ritchie’s signature laddish sexuality makes a difference. Cavill eroticizes his Superman persona (Gus waggles his tongue when taking out villains), and Alan “Arms” Ritchson’s Lassen flexes archery-honed muscles, one of the 100 ways he knows to kill a man. (That Lassen also flirts with gayness is a Ritchie jest that twists convention the same way Tom Hardy’s Handsome Bob does in RocknRolla).
Ritchie’s directorial style has gained panache. Ministry is not nearly as proficient as Chad Stahelski’s John Wick 4 or Matthias Schweighöfer’s Army of Thieves, but the pell-mell combat scenes are consistently cartoonish. The levity in Ministry exaggerates our response to contemporary political violence that is not tongue-in-cheek (the ongoing harsh and uncivil lawfare). Gus and his boys kill efficiently, relentlessly. They’re authorized by Churchill (Rory Kinnear imitating Gary Oldman’s Darkest Hour charade), who declares, “Hitler’s not playing by the rules, neither are we.”
In pop terms, Ministry moves past the punch-a-Nazi phase first indulged during the post-Covid reset; it was the Left’s disingenuous way of assuming victory. That’s why Ritchie makes Nazi bad guy Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger) the film’s strongest performance. Not only the most alarming movie Nazi since Ralph Fiennes’s Amon Göth in Schindler’s List, he’s also an ultra Bond villain. Humanizing “the mainspring of evil,” Luhr reminds us what all that fighting was for, and why Churchill objected to Parliament’s call for appeasement — the reason he launched his secret ministry. We are privy to that secret and can root for Ritchie’s studly rogues because we’re living in an era of appeasement and thwarted heroism.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is lightweight entertainment in which Gus is as much a fashion-conscious playboy as a patriot. It’s when an agent is given orders that Ritchie defines his own role in the new world order: Seduce and distract.
