![\"Henry](\"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/ministry_of_ungentlemanly_warfare_1.0.jpg\")
Now available on digital release and 4K, the Henry Cavill movie takes Ritchie\u2019s gentleman thugs back to basics<\/p>\n
British movie director Guy Ritchie loves nothing more than the collision of class and thuggery. It\u2019s like catnip to him. In movies like Snatch <\/em>and 2019\u2019s The Gentlemen<\/em>, he thrives on putting plummy toffs next to venal crims and seeing what happens \u2014 or combining the two. This is the director who turned Sherlock Holmes into a pugilist<\/a>, after all. His idea of Englishness encompasses the wood-paneled manor and the stinking fish market, but nothing in between. His idea of masculinity is Vinnie Jones, the foul-mouthed, brutal Cockney soccer player, but dressed like a country squire, with a hunting shotgun in the crook of his arm.<\/p>\n Ritchie has actually made all kinds of movies in all kinds of modes, from the rom-com Swept Away<\/em> to Disney\u2019s live-action Aladdin <\/em>remake<\/a>. But he remains defined by the tone he set in his first two films, 1998\u2019s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels<\/em> and 2000\u2019s Snatch \u2014<\/em> laddish crime capers that at the time felt like a Britpop answer to Quentin Tarantino. These movies pinned down a regional genre that Ritchie\u2019s former collaborator Matthew Vaughn later supercharged into something more stylized and ironized, especially in the cartoonish, James Bond-baiting Kingsman series of spy flicks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Because Ritchie\u2019s early movies loom so large, and because his legacy and Vaughn\u2019s have been so muddled together, it\u2019s natural to expect Ritchie\u2019s World War II film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare<\/em> to play in similarly over-the-top fashion, like a mix of Kingsman<\/em> and Tarantino\u2019s Inglourious Basterds<\/em>. The title and trailer<\/a> of the movie, which is now available on DVD, 4K UHD, and on demand, seem to suggest that, too.<\/p>\n But Ritchie isn\u2019t that kind of director anymore, if he ever was. In the last few years, he\u2019s reined in his stylistic flourishes, dialed down his budgets, and settled into a comfortable rhythm as a fast-moving genre workhorse, cranking out well-crafted, efficient, unvarnished films at a pace that should impress even Steven Soderbergh. Ungentlemanly Warfare<\/em> is one of these: a brisk, no-nonsense wartime adventure as clipped as the posh accent of its star, Henry Cavill. It\u2019s got more in common with the original 1967 version of The Dirty Dozen <\/em>than with Tarantino\u2019s postmodern take on it<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare<\/em>\u2019s premise is that Winston Churchill himself (Rory Kinnear) commissions a deniable black ops mission to a neutral West African port, with the goal of destroying the supply lines feeding the Nazi U-boats that have a stranglehold on the Atlantic. This actually happened; it was called Operation Postmaster<\/a>, and Ritchie\u2019s movie is based on Damien Lewis\u2019 nonfiction book about it<\/a>. Many of the film\u2019s characters, including Cavill\u2019s Captain Gus March-Phillipps, are real people, but the story has been very heavily fictionalized.<\/p>\n In Ritchie\u2019s version, March-Phillipps is an unruly loose cannon who just happens to have the perfect manners of the old Etonian he is. (The real March-Phillipps was supposedly one of Ian Fleming\u2019s models for James Bond; Slow Horses<\/em><\/a>\u2019 Freddie Fox plays Fleming in the movie, in his days as a naval intelligence officer.) March-Phillipps is tasked with putting together a commando team of similarly reckless ne\u2019er-do-wells to carry out Churchill\u2019s plan. He assembles a group whose chiseled good looks and extreme muscle definition are only matched by their impeccable sang-froid. <\/p>\n In truth, they\u2019re a more forgettable bunch than is ideal for a movie like this, with the exception of ginormous actor Alan Ritchson (Reacher<\/em>) as Anders Lassen \u2014 though he\u2019s memorable for both good and bad reasons. Ritchson\u2019s brutal fight scenes are among the movie\u2019s biggest pleasures, but the film\u2019s biggest shock comes when you realize he\u2019ll be doing that terrible Danish accent for the whole story.<\/p>\n There isn\u2019t much more to relate about this extremely simple film. There\u2019s a sadistic Nazi bad guy played by Til Schweiger. There are a couple of intrepid spies (Eiza Gonz\u00e1lez and Babs Olusanmokun) who almost have more to do than the commandos themselves, and definitely have more charisma. Kinnear underplays Churchill, and unfortunately, so does his makeup. Ritchie includes one of those rather sad scenes that attempts to set up a movie franchise you just know will never come to pass.<\/p>\n The dialogue (by Ritchie and three other screenwriters) is lumpy and unconvincing, but that\u2019s not why anyone watches a film like this. It\u2019s a romp, disposable but sturdily made, with satisfyingly blunt action scenes that have been framed by a true master. Lots of things blow up, Ritchson murders many a Nazi, and Cavill sticks his tongue out while firing a machine gun. (Remember when he fired one one-handed while leaning out of a helicopter in Mission: Impossible – Fallout<\/em><\/a>? Has anyone other than Arnie looked better handling a machine gun on screen? I don\u2019t think so.)<\/p>\n Ungentlemanly Warfare <\/em>is a serviceable action movie, and its plainness is, paradoxically, the most interesting thing about it. At one point, Cavill persuades a local African warlord (Danny Sapani) to join his mission, essentially by pointing out that they both went to Eton. Their connection is laden with social, racial, and colonial baggage, but Ritchie makes nothing more of it than a celebration of this ancient brotherhood of privileged bullies. Old Etonians know when something\u2019s just not cricket, and they\u2019ll bloody well roll their sleeves up and slaughter whoever gets in their way if they need to, won\u2019t they, old chap?<\/p>\n Forgive me; as a Brit who\u2019s spent the last 14 years living under the casually cruel rule of exactly<\/a> this<\/a> breed<\/a> of entitled, stiff-upper-lip, overgrown schoolboy, I can do without it. Ungentlemanly Warfare<\/em> modernizes and diversifies the archetype\u2019s self-glorifying narrative a bit, but without really examining it. Ritchie seems happy to have found a straightforward, harmonized historical origin point for his manly ideal of well-bred thugs \u2014 and never mind all that problematic stuff about Empire.<\/p>\n He can do better. I prefer his current Netflix series The Gentlemen<\/em>, adapted from his 2019 film, about a young duke who discovers that his inherited estate comes with a profitable marijuana farm attached. That series is just as obsessed with the collision of class and violence; in the first episode, \u201cRefined Aggression,\u201d Giancarlo Esposito delivers a speech \u2014 almost a manifesto \u2014 that perfectly distills the Ritchie aesthetic. (\u201cPeople either survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo; few recognize the significance of the paradoxical reconciliation of the two.\u201d) Netflix\u2019s The Gentlemen <\/em>is mostly played for broad comedy and thrills. But in its modern setting, it finds some interesting, inverted power dynamics among its cast of toffs, gangsters, and ruthless moneymen \u2014 and it\u2019s almost satirical in the way it portrays them.<\/p>\n Guy Ritchie knows his patch. In The Gentlemen<\/em>, he rakes it over thoroughly, turning up new material. In The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare<\/em>, he retreats into its comforting lies to spin another yarn about chaps who are a bit naughty, and jolly good at killing. Both of these projects are entertaining enough while they last, but only one of them bears thinking about afterward. <\/p>\n The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare<\/em><\/small> is now available for rental or purchase on <\/small>Amazon<\/small><\/a>, <\/small>Vudu<\/small><\/a>, and other digital platforms, and on <\/small>DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K SteelBook<\/small><\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photo: Dan Smith\/Lionsgate via Everett Collection Now available on digital release and 4K, the Henry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6537,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530\/revisions\/6537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Henry](\"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/ministry_of_ungentlemanly_warfare_4.jpg\")
\n Photo: Dan Smith\/Lionsgate via Everett Collection<\/cite>
\n <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n![\"Alan](\"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/ministry_of_ungentlemanly_warfare_3.jpg\")
\n Photo: Dan Smith\/Lionsgate via Everett Collection<\/cite>
\n <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n![\"Eiza](\"http:\/\/phoenixengin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/ministry_of_ungentlemanly_warfare_2.jpg\")
\n Photo: Dan Smith\/Lionsgate via Everett Collection<\/cite>
\n <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n