The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ★★½

GUY Ritchie misfires with his World War II spy action-comedy The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

On the whole the English director’s filmography since his sensational 1998 debut with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells has been very good.

Snatch, RocknRolla, The Gentleman and his two Sherlock Holmes films have been praised by most critics and I also enjoyed more recent efforts like The Wrath of Man and The Covenant.

Swept Away, released in 2002, was his only real stinker until 2023’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, coincidentally another spy action-comedy, which some liked but I thought was completely pedestrian.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare should have been good. It’s based on very interesting true events and has an interesting cast, including Henry Cavill, Eliza Gonzalez, Helen Golding, Alex Pettyfer and Alan Ritchson (who plays Reacher in the television series).

But it never truly comes to life, mainly because the characters never rise above being cardboard cut-outs and there is little suspense generated despite the life-threatening stakes involved, both on a personal level and for the war effort in general.

The real-life, espionage team put together by the English military in 1941 and signed-off by PM Winston Churchill to embark on a dangerous, undercover mission in Spain, was no-doubt full of eccentric and enigmatic individuals, but you wouldn’t know it from this script which makes them all one-note and invincible in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Cavill gets most of the attention, but even his constant wise-cracking becomes repetitious and less engaging. Others, like Gonzalez, get almost nothing to do.

The climax is unintentionally comic as our heroes mow down enemies in their stride with no concern for their own survival. It’s like they are engaged in one of those firearms training sessions where you take out pop-up cardboard targets.

As if we needed any more cardboard.

Watched on Prime.