Film Review

Operation Mincemeat (2021)

During WWII, British intelligence officers use a corpse and fake documents to mislead the German high command.

Director John Madden is perhaps best known for slightly twee celebrations of Englishness (Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love, the Exotic Marigold Hotel films), and Operation Mincemeat certainly slots into that category, although in subject matter it also connects his Louis de Bernières adaptation Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001). It’s a return to World War II territory for screenwriter Michelle Ashford, too, following her acclaimed work on HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010).

But the tradition into which Operation Mincemeat most clearly fits is that of the stiff-upper-lip English war film, and indeed not only could it easily have been made 70 years ago, it pretty much was, as The Man Who Never Was (1956) told the same true story of an audacious deception that fatally misled the Nazis and made a significant difference to the progress of the war.