Guy Ritchie Goes Brutally Posh

Every line out of Henry Cavill’s mouth in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare goes something like “Cheerio, lads, jolly good to have you aboard, now let’s not find ourselves in a spot of bother,” at which point he takes out a machine gun and mows down a row of Nazis. Cavill plays Gus March-Phillipps, an actual member of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive who led a top-secret mission to take out a ship key to keeping German U-boats supplied in 1942. There are five commandos in Gus’s crew, working with undercover agents played by Eiza González and Babs Olusanmokun, and while not all of them speak in plummy RP — Alan Ritchson, as Anders Lassen, affects a Danish(ish) lilt, while Hero Fiennes Tiffin puts on an Irish accent to play Henry Hayes — the majority of them do. Henry Golding, as diver Freddy Alvarez, calls everyone “chaps” right before the bomb he set on a warship explodes. Alex Pettyfer, whose Geoffrey Appleyard has to be saved from torture by the Gestapo before he can join the mission, politely requests that his rescuers unplug the battery still delivering juice to the clamps attached to his nipples. It’s enough to make the movie feel like The Dirty Dozen by way of P. G. Wodehouse.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the 15th feature from Guy Ritchie, and while it’s not very good, it’s also hard to dislike something that has the genial tone of a day-drunk romp. What’s funny is that it comes from a man who once seemed so attached to the fast-talking London crime capers he made a name for himself with that when he got a chance to direct a King Arthur movie, his big idea was to turn the legendary figure into a tough guy gangster. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, in contrast, leans so far in the other direction that it almost makes some larger point about Ritchie’s career as a boarding-school expellee who went on to cloak himself in swaggering streetwise valor. Its aggressively facial-haired hunks, who carry out a fictionalized take on a real WWII mission called Operation Postmaster, are meant to be a disreputable group too wild for the confines of the official British military — Gus starts the film in jail, Anders cuts out Nazi hearts as trophies, and Freddy is addicted to destruction. (Henry and Geoffrey are just kind of there.)

But The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare takes every opportunity to underscore its characters’ upper-crustiness, making the experience of watching it not unlike that of going to an illicit rager in a grubby loft and slowly realizing that everyone there went to Yale. Hell, at one point Gus meets with Kambili Kalu (Danny Sapani), the prince turned pirate of the Spanish occupied island where Operation Postmaster takes place, and it turns out they both went to Eton, then bond over having played cricket there. When asked to join the mission, Kambili doesn’t even want to be paid — though he wouldn’t mind a knighthood. It’s hard to say if the film’s affection for the attitudes of the British aristocracy is sincerely felt or some kind of put-on. When Quentin Tarantino had Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers, and Rod Taylor face off in that cavernous room in Inglourious Basterds, showing off accents that were respectively crisp, stiff, and jowly (with nary an actual Brit among them), it was a heightened tribute to a classic tradition of British film actors. The tone of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, on the other hand, is never sharp enough to approach satire but also too over the top to be taken at face value.

Once upon a time, Ritchie and Tarantino were grouped together — two aspiring auteurs who emerged in the ’90s with a taste for violence and style to burn. The only reason someone might group them together today is that The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which is drawn from a book by Damien Lewis, cribs so shamelessly from the 2009 Tarantino title that the movie plays like fix-it fanfiction from someone who didn’t like how many characters got killed in the original. There’s little sense of danger in Ritchie’s movie and not much in the way of suspense even in the murky finale, which deigns to allow one of its characters to get winged by a bullet while making it clear they all need to be preserved in case there’s ever a sequel. Ritchie wasn’t at the film’s New York premiere because he’s already started on his next project — a rate that makes you wonder if his occasional good movies (the delightful The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which also featured Cavill), his returns to form (the dreadful The Gentlemen), and his for-hire hackwork (Aladdin) have all essentially become the same to him. What is Etonian cricket talk if not just another form of blokey bonding, after all?