April 22, 2024 · Watch the trailer
It’s incredibly hard to make a World War II movie feel fresh and original because the devastating, biggest, bloodiest conflict in history has been examined from almost every angle.
Director Guy Ritchie takes his own crack at WWII with the previously untold, largely true story of a team of criminals, killers, and thieves tasked with secret assignments by the British government that they can’t do officially in “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”
Ritchie attempts to make a film evoking “The Dirty Dozen” and “Inglourious Basterds” but often takes on the more straight line, almost mundane inevitability of a lesser action film.
In what is clearly an attempt to create a new film franchise about antiheroes killing Nazis to help save the planet, “Ungentlemanly Warfare” finds the team on their first major assignment, heading to a region on the coast of Africa to destroy supply ships keeping German U-boats stockaded and preventing Americans from entering the war.
Henry Cavill is featured as the lead star of the film and his suave and debonair certainly plays into Ritchie’s sort of gritty, British charm that pervades his filmography, though as is the case with the entire film, there isn’t much character development or emotional stakes to tie the narrative together.
“Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a film that’s more “The A-Team” than “Ocean’s Eleven,” more “Kingsman” than “Inglourious Basterds.”
Because there are so many composite parts to the mission at hand, there is a need to litter the film with a deep cast who all seem to get about average screentime with uneven effect.
The best of the ensemble is “Reacher” star Alan Ritchson, whose towering frame and forboding presence is smartly undercut with a shy, humble persona and Ritchson carries most of the film’s action both in hand-to-hand combat and with a bow and arrow to great success that should help elevate his status to a leading action film star moving forward.
Eiza González of “Baby Driver” fame also stands out for her turn as an actress tasked with infiltrating a German camp by seducing the Nazi commandant and distracting him to allow the team to complete their mission.
It’s an easy conceit in cinema to just have nameless, faceless bad guys be the villains of the film, especially when a filmmaker can clothe them in swastikas and tell audiences, “Hey, these guys are evil; don’t worry about why.” “Ungentlemanly Warfare” leans heavily into this, making its antagonists excessively mustache twirling as a shortcut to good storytelling.
Til Schweiger’s Heinrich Lühr, the primary antagonist of the film, really wants audiences to feel the influence of Christophe Waltz’s Oscar winning turn as Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds” in his performance, though it’s less homage and more caricature of a much more well-rounded, proper villain.
Between this and the clear lack of emotional stakes, any tension in “Ungentlemanly Warfare” is entirely superficial and while it’s a nice, fun time at the movies, the entire project just feels empty.
Though Ritchie does inject the film with his directorial style filled with fast cut editing and snappy dialogue, the inconsistencies in the storytelling – which Ritchie adapted from original screenwriter Arash Amel – and the plethora of moving parts muddles the narrative and forces audiences to ping pong across continents and characters at an alarming rate.
“Ungentlemanly Warfare” wants to be a much bigger, better movie than it ultimately becomes and its casual, bloody combat and happy-go-lucky brightness make Ritchie’s film an easy lark of a time that could be saved for an at home streaming release months from now.
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