The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare — Movie Review
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is directed by Guy Ritchie and it stars a cast consisting of Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Henry Golding as a ragtag group of soldiers who are sent out on a secret mission to infiltrate enemy lines and sabotage German forces as the United Kingdon struggles to contain the spread of Nazi Germany during World War II. It’s loosely based off of true events that occured in 1942.
As far as Guy Ritchie is concerned, I can either take him or leave him as a director. He’s never really been the guy who guns for the Oscars, as his wheelhouse has usually been these over-the-top action movies filled with equally over-the-top characters who ooze charm and panache as they take out their enemies. Some times it works, some times it doesn’t. Simple as that. And when we get Ritchie trying for something that’s different from his usual filmography, we end up with 2019’s Aladdin and I don’t think we need to relive that again. Overall, I’ve enjoyed some of Ritchie’s works, but I also feel like I’d be greatly challenging myself if I were to try and think of one of his movies that I’ve really loved.
To start out on a positive note here, I did enjoy the performances from the cast. Each of our main characters have some degree of charisma, zaniness, and bombast that we’d expect from a Guy Ritchie film and it’s fun to see these actors flex their more carefree, but still entertaining acting chops. I’m really glad to see Henry Cavill get some more time to shine after whatever the hell was going on with him in Argylle earlier in the year and the likes of Alan Ritchson and Eiza Gonzalez make a solid impression on me seeing as how I’m not too familiar with their prior works as actors. All in all, this is one of those movies where you can tell everyone seemed to be having a good time. I’ll probably end up eating those words when I find some Reddit article about some of the actors not getting along while filming, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
With the premise being about of group of larger than life personalities going around and killing Nazis, you know what you’re getting into from an action standpoint. For the movie’s first half or so, the Nazi killing action was a lot of fun to watch. They get mowed down in some wild ways and the style of filmmaking is completely balls-to-the-wall in the most unashamed way possible, but that’s just Guy Ritchie for you. It’s a simple matter of how much you enjoy these extravagant action set pieces and I can’t deny that I was entertained seeing this group of nobodies take down the scum of the Earth… for the first half.
There honestly comes a point during the halfway point leading into the third act where the action started to feel very repetitive and stale. What starts out as fun turns into tensionless noise and I reached a point where I started to notice that the Nazis were getting taken down too easily and the heroes seemed to be borderline invincible and unbothered by being shot at. I would’ve liked to have seen a little more stakes, such as the main characters having a bit of a “hope is lost” moment where they’re being pinned down and escape seems impossible. Maybe have one of our heroes get injured or some aspect of the plan goes awry. Something, anything to add some stakes and variety to action scenes that are otherwise just a lot of Nazis getting gunned down with extreme ease. It actually started to get a little boring as the movie moved along.
This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but this movie isn’t exactly filled to the brim with three-dimensional, nuanced characters with amazingly written arcs. I was expecting that much walking into the theater, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t critique it in this review. As fun as these actors appear to be having, the characters themselves start to feel just as tired as the action. Each character is basically boiled down to just one trait and the movie’s idea of synergy amongst them doesn’t stray much further than calling each other “Chap” repeatedly. I wasn’t expecting some deep character study, but the characters all started to blend together as interchangeable loud personalities who just like to shoot Nazis and yell a lot.
I really wanted to avoid comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but I just can’t help it at this point. The premise is obviously similar and I won’t go so far as to say that this movie is ripping off Tarantino’s 2009 film, but you can tell that Ritchie was heavily influenced. In general, a lot of the dialogue in this film feels very much like it’s really trying to be Tarantino-esque, but in the year 2024, screenwriters should know better than to try and emulate Tarantino dialogue. We saw Bullet Train, we know it doesn’t work. And there even comes a point in this film where we’re introduced to a Nazi Commander who’s very clearly supposed to be this movie’s version of Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa, but it goes about as well as you’d expect from a writing standpoint. As much as I wanted to avoid the comparisons, there were undeniable some moments during this movie where I felt like I was watching the dollar store, straight to DVD version of Inglorious Basterds.
Overall, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is a movie that’s fun in doses, but the lack of variety amongst the action and characters really grinds the fun to a halt at a point and there’s an undeniable derivative nature to it all. While not necessarily a bad movie, it’s a Guy Ritchie movie that feels like it’s on Ritchie’s own version of auto pilot. With him, sometimes he just throws in explosions, shootouts, and snarky characters and that’s enough work for a day. Your enjoyment of this movie will hinge on that and for me, it just didn’t leave much of an impression on me positively or negatively. It’s an action movie that just… is.
