Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a slight, but immensely fun WWII thriller. The Henry Cavill-led movie is now playing in theaters.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a Guy Ritchie movie through and through. After bursting onto the U.K. film scene in the late ’90s with rough-and-ready, rowdy crime titles like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Ritchie has spent the past decade transitioning into a more journeyman-type director. That is to say that his most recent films, including The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and The Covenant, have all lacked the verve and scrappy personality that once defined his work, but have, at the same time, been competently made and pleasingly watchable.
Once upon a time, a wide array of directors could have made those movies. Nowadays, however, the number of filmmakers working in Hollywood who possess Ritchie’s kind of old-fashioned, tried-and-true skill set is depressingly small. Few current midlevel directors know how to direct action movies that breathe and move as well as his do, and even fewer know how to make it look as easy as he does. That’s certainly true of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a World War II-set action comedy that doesn’t push itself as far as it could,but does rise to meet its own, modest expectations without breaking a sweat.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare‘s approach to its plot is laid out in its first scene, which follows a Nazi naval officer as he boards a fishing boat seemingly occupied only by two men, Anders Lassen (Reacher‘s Alan Ritchson) and Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill), who claim that they’re simply two longtime friends on vacation. When the Nazi officer tries to intimidate them, they laugh in his face, and it’s only a few seconds later that they’re easily and violently dispatching with him and all of his German soldiers on board. The scene succinctly sets up what is to come in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a thriller that isn’t so much interested in challenging its characters as it is in demonstrating time and again just how good they are at their jobs.
