The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill hatches a daring plan to neutralize Hitler's fleet of German U-boats during World War II. Utilizing a motley crew of rogues and mavericks who specialize in unconventional techniques, he sends a top-secret combat unit to take the fight to the Nazis and change the course of the war.

I was torn on whether or not to even watch this one.

It’s true, I do love a good “men on a mission” film. Most often a subgenre of the war flick, a "men on a mission” movie features a ragtag group of soldiers banding together to accomplish an insurmountable task against all odds. Think films like… The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen, Seven Samurai, Predator, Kelly’s Heroes, Blade II, Three Kings, Hell is for Heroes, The Wild Bunch, The Suicide Squad, Eastern Condors, The Untouchables, 13 Assassins, Rogue One, Munich, Where Eagles Dare, The Rock, and of course… Eliminators.

This is one of my things, one of the kinds of ideas that I gravitate towards in fiction.

So, yeah, I was interested in this film, the somewhat (very) loosely based on the true exploits of Gustavus “Gus” Henry March-Phillipps—a man who was not only one of Ian Fleming's main inspirations for the character of James Bond, but also founded the British Army's famed No. 62 Commando team. Also known as the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF), this team was a forerunner of not just the Special Air Service (SAS), but of Black Ops Commando missions in general, and the film very loosely tells how Gus March-Phillipps and his team of specialists (all of whom were killed in action by the end of World War 2) pulled off Operation Postmaster, one of the first modern day Black Ops Commando missions.

But like I said, I was torn on watching this film, because also… Guy Ritchie is a shit filmmaker. It’s true, he is. People cling to Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but that bastard child of Tarantino came out over a quarter of a century ago, and he’s been riding that high ever since. After Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre I was thinking of swearing off Ritchie’s films forever, but then this one comes along, and it’s a “Men on a Mission” film, so I figured… fine.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…

So, the story goes like this… It’s 1941. America has yet to tell the Nazi lovers that infect their own shores to shut the fuck up (including such Nazis as Prescott Bush, Charles Lindbergh, and many more), so they can finally get into the business of killing Nazis, and while waiting for this to happen, England has found itself in dire straits. On the verge of surrendering to Hitler, Churchill’s only chance at keeping the Crown in the war is to blow up a ship full of the CO2 scrubbers that the German U-boat fleet relies on. If he can pull this off, the Americans will have a better chance to safely cross the Atlantic, which will not only bring England much needed supplies, but will allow America to begin to amass its forces on English soil, and begin preparations for the invasion of Fortress Europe. The ship in question is moored off the island of Fernando Po, now known as Bioko, in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa, an island owned by the nominally neutral Spain, and it is protected by a large Nazi garrison.

Enter Major March-Phillipps, his incredibly impressive mustache, and his merry band of similarly mustachioed men, each one a Nazi-hating killing machine, including the absolute beast of man who plays Reacher in the tv show Reacher.

After that, the film is basically a Dollar Store Inglourious Basterds meets Oceans Eleven, as we learn the true-ish story of how, due to our merry band of heroes merrily massacring that most irredeemable of monsters, the Nazi, wherever their jackbooted feet should foul the very ground upon which they trod, the world is eventually spared of the fascist menace…

Or at least, it was, but then 2012 rolled around and Barrack Obama dared to win his 2nd term in office, defeating that human wetnap Mitt Romney—the candidate White America sincerely considered to be their compromise candidate—only for “liberals” to spit in their faces and re-elect a Black man, causing an overwhelming majority of White America, across all demographics, to cast aside their “polite and civil” public masks, and to fully embrace the racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and deep, deep love of fascism that has long festered within their rotten, rotten souls…

But I digress…

Yes, it’s true, this movie is much more in line with the kind of film that I wanted Inglourious Basterds to be, as I’ve always felt that the dualing stories in that particular film only end up hindering each other. And yes, while I will obviously give this movie a whole bunch of points for its rampant, unapologetic, and even gleeful amount of Nazi killings, something I wholeheartedly approve of in any context, this film is still very much a Guy Ritchie movie… by which I mean, it’s all style and no substance.

It’s fine. It’s fluff. That’s it. It’s fine fluff.

That said, while the film is never really all that bad, it’s never really all that good either. This is a film that mostly suffers from being too obvious, not to mention too try-hard, especially when it comes to its very deliberately overly-fanciful style.

Still, as far as fluff is concerned, this is a good enough time. Plus, it sends an all-around good general message that killing Nazis is always a good thing, and often a funny thing too, so really, I think it could be considered a good film for the whole family. In the end, while I wouldn’t call this movie a “good” film by any stretch, I’d say it’s the best Guy Ritchie film in a long, long time... maybe even in a quarter century.