The Media Tourist

Henry Cavill leads a bunch of rogue-rascal Brits on a super-secret WWII mission

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Starring Henry Cavill, Alan Richson, Babs Olusanmokun & Eiza Gonzáles
Directed by Guy Richie
Rated R

In theaters Friday, April 19

A group of rip-roaring rapscallions plots to wipe out a nest of nasty Nazis in this World War II action romp inspired by a true story. Director Guy Richie’s latest baddie-laddie ensemble flick is based on a 1942 covert mission by British operatives to sabotage the supply chain for German submarines making the Atlantic so treacherous for Allied Forces.

That’s just a bunch of blah-blah, though, in this movie mainly about hot bods and bang-bang. Germans are dispatched by the dozen with just about every weapon imaginable—guns, grenades, shivs, an axe and a bow and arrows. There are bombs on boats, bombs in bunkers, bombs on beaches.

Alan Richson also stars in TV’s ‘Reacher.’

And bombshells all over the screen. Hunky Henry Cavill (known for his recurring roles as Superman) and equally hunky (if not even hunkier) Alan Richson (who stars as the title character in the Prime action series Reacher) look like they just came from a Britbox special on history’s hottest stealth fighters. Eiza Gonzáles (below), the only female in the cast, plays another real-life character (model-turned-Hollywood actress Margie Stewart) whose actual role in the real mission is historically vague—although she sure vamps it up here as a sexy spy, at one point dressed as a bare-midriff Cleopatra, seducing a smitten SS officer (Til Schweiger) and sashaying onstage through “Mack the Knife” for a group of cheering, leering Nazis. (For some reason, it made me think of Madeline Kahn cavorting for a saloon full of cowboys in the saloon as Lili Von Schtupp in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.)

The movie’s mission is a high-stakes hail Mary pass by Great Britain, desperate to keep Hitler’s forces from marching ashore after stomping across Europe. Although Winston Churchill himself (Rory Kinnear plays the famous Prime Minister) has sanctioned them, these brazen Brits know they’ll be arrested for war crimes if they’re snared by the British navy—and certainly executed if captured by the Nazis. Churchill gives the go-ahead for the group to do whatever it takes to succeed, even if it means breaking the rules and stooping below wartime “conventions.” It’s a job for ungentlemanly gentlemen and their dirty tricks.  

And as a kind of pseudo-historical bonus, the movie offers a thru-line to the world’s most famous superspy. James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, was a British intelligence officer in WWII, and his fictional, suave 007 was inspired by the character Cavill plays in the film—the quippy, dashingly handsome, caddish commando Gus March-Phillips, who was the real-life husband of actress, model (and maybe special agent) Margie Stewart. In the film, Fleming is also around, without much to do but observe, and played by British actor Freddie Fox.

The appearance of Bond’s creator in a movie also featuring an actor rumored to be under consideration to play the next movie Bond (Cavill)….portraying the real-world inspiration for James Bond….makes everything feel a bit like a mobius strip with historical facts on one side and pop fiction on the other.

There’s a lot of adrenaline-stoked action, retorts of snappy British banter and spasms of highly choreographed violence—all hallmarks of director Guy Richie’s other projects like his Gentleman franchise, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. But there’s also the sense that The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is siphoning off mojo from a couple of other WWII-adjacent films, including The Dirty Dozen from the 1960s and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

The plot is a bombs-away jumble and gets particularly chaotic toward the end. Much of the mostly British ensemble cast—Henry Golding, Cary Elwes, Alex Pettyfer—gets lost in the crossfire…and the undercover “darkness” of night, which envelopes almost the entire second half of the film. But at least most of the “name” actors fare far better than almost all the cardboard-villain Nazis. The fearsome SS is a bunch of easily dispatched doofuses only there to be mowed down by this cheeky crew of hunky Brits in a sailboat.

“They’ll thank you for this one day,” someone remarks to March-Phillips. And indeed they did, as the real characters were ultimately recognized for their bravery and their under-the-radar dirty deeds. But as a movie, I don’t predict a lot of accolades for this lad-fest blowout, a distinctly Guy Richie concoction of glib violence, gabby retorts and implausibly smooth subterfuge, with studly, scruffy scallywags and a foxy, pistol-packing siren—plus a pop-cultural nod to another dapper “gentleman” who’d come along a couple of decades later with his own license to kill.

—Neil Pond