Jonah Naplan   April 19, 2024

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a film created by the College Board to give AP European History students an obscure piece of outside evidence to use on their DBQ on the exam. Yes, this film is based on a real squad of special forces assembled by Winston Churchill during WWII on a mission called Operation Postmaster, whose directive was to blow up a group of German U-boats parked near the island of Fernando Po before they could attack. It wasn’t until 2016 that this story came into the limelight from the uncovered personal files of Churchill, but now Guy Ritchie has made a feature length movie about the mission that glorifies violence and mass death to an extravagant extreme. It’s also not a very good movie, despite Ritchie’s usual bag of tricks and knack for quippy dialogue exchanges and editing, and the onscreen actors just sort of playing to what they’ve always done best.

There is some intrigue to be found, however, in what the real story actually is, and how a real life event can possibly exist that translates into blockbuster adaptation so well. Operation Postmaster was simply made for film, and if it was never picked up by Guy Ritchie, then it surely would have been by Michael Bay, or Zack Snyder, or Kathryn Bigelow. Ritchie employs all the guns, knives, explosions, muscles and brawn to tell this story, and it’s done in a (relatively) breezy manner, despite lacking real stakes or suspense about how it’ll all even out. Hitler committed suicide, Germany surrendered, the Third Reich was terminated, Europe was cleansed of fascism. But you’d never know by the characters in this movie who see the mission as life or death for the future of their country, selling the overdramatized potential of the threat but also having fun just blowing stuff up real good. The movie takes place in January 1942, in a post-Pearl Harbor, post-Operation Barbarossa, and post-invasion of Czechoslovakia version of Europe. Each of the assassins have their own “beef” with the Nazis, most because they had family members or friends who were exterminated by Hitler’s Red Army, and others just because they’re supporting those with personal vendettas. 

There’s both an on-sight and background team to this mission; those doing the dirty work are the leader of the group Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill), who doesn’t like “playing by the rules,” a big-chested head of strength named Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), an expert swimmer who can perfect his craft even with his feet tied together named Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding), Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), and Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), whom the team breaks out of a Nazi fortress in an early scene, a car battery attached to his nipples. The background team is a duo of Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun), who owns a bar and casino near the targeted port. This duet is not nearly as interesting as that of the actual peacekeepers, and any time the film cut to them for a long period, I wished for the fighters to come back.

The plot is fairly simple and not much happens in terms of defined events. Churchill (Rory Kinnear) and representatives of British intelligence—Brigadier Gubbins or “M” (Cary Elwes, a classic collaborator of Ritchie) and Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox), who would supposedly use the adventures of this team as inspiration for his James Bond novels—employ Phillipps and his crew to take on this mission and hopefully succeed, lest they want to be thrown in jail by the British police or, worse, tortured and killed by the Germans. The first scene depicts their burly strength as they pose as fishermen before taking down a bigger German sailboat with bravado, a cold open filled with Ritchie-isms in line with his other work in “Snatch,” the two “Sherlock Holmes” movies, “The Gentlemen” and “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre”—one of two movies he released last year.

Not much happens in the rest of the film besides the mission itself, which probably takes up the last 45 minutes, and characters standing around talking about how the mission is gonna happen. There’s loads of missed potential here; all of it sad and disappointing, and a severe lack of tension from the script by Ritchie and co-writers Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, and Arash Amel. On several occasions, the movie will hint that it’s about to create some sort of shifty camaraderie but then never live up to that promise, particularly between González’s character and a Nazi head honcho played by Til Schweiger who’s so cartoonishly villainous that he’d likely hit it off over a beer with Taika Waititi’s Hitler in “Jojo Rabbit.”

Of course, all of this could be forgiven if the movie is at least entertaining enough to pass two hours. It is not. For a shoot-’em-up action flick, this is a surprisingly boring movie with minimal character development and an implausible plot that makes it particularly difficult to suspend your disbelief. This is the type of picture where characters can peek into a secret bunker where bad guys are planning an attack, throw a grenade inside and then walk swiftly away with a wink and a nod before the whole establishment explodes in a ball of fire behind them. Both parties have guns, but the Nazis seemingly always miss their shot, while the good guys are always right on target. Ritchson’s character, especially, is apparently so skilled with a bow and arrow that he can be looking in one direction, but shoot his weapon in another and never miss a victim. It helps too that this band of Nazis are so prone to making dumb decisions and underestimating this ragtag group that their demise is all written out from the very beginning. Clearly they’ve never seen a movie before.

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” could have evolved into something of a fictionalized battle cry like last year’s brilliantly bloody “Sisu,” but Ritchie never takes enough risks to allow his film the benefit of the doubt. Better luck next time with actual textbooks we suppose.

Now playing in theaters.