British film director Guy Ritchie loves nothing more than the combination of class and violence. It’s like catnip to him. In films like Jerking and that of 2019 The gentlemen, he thrives on putting plummy toffs next to venal thugs and seeing what happens – or combining the two. This is the director who turned around Sherlock Holmes as a boxer, finally. His idea of Englishness includes the wood-paneled country house and the stinking fish market, but nothing in between. His idea of masculinity is Vinnie Jones, the foul-mouthed, brash Cockney footballer, but dressed like a country squire, with a shotgun in the crook of his arm.
Ritchie has actually made all kinds of films in all kinds of modes, from rom-com Wiped out to Disney’s live action Aladdin remake. But he remains defined by the tone he set in his first two films, from 1998 Lock, Stock and two smoking barrels and 2000s jerking — boyish crime hairstyles that at the time felt like a Britpop answer to Quentin Tarantino. These films established a regional genre that Ritchie’s former collaborator Matthew Vaughn later transformed into something more stylized and exasperated, especially in the cartoonish, James Bond-challenging Kingsman series of spy films.
Because Ritchie’s early films are so great, and because his legacy and Vaughn’s are so conflated, it is natural to expect that Ritchie’s World War II film The Ministry of Unfriendly Warfare to play in a similarly exaggerated manner, as a mix of King’s man and Tarantino’s unglorious bastards. The title and trailer of the film, which is now available on DVD, 4K UHD and on demand, seems to suggest as much.
Photo: Dan Smith/Lionsgate via Everett Collection
But Ritchie isn’t much of a director anymore, if he ever was. In recent years, he’s reined in his stylistic chops, trimmed his budgets, and found a comfortable rhythm as a fast-moving workhorse in the genre, delivering well-crafted, efficient, unvarnished films at a pace that should impress even Steven. Soderbergh. Unfriendly warfare is one of them: a lively, no-nonsense war adventure, as clipped as the posh accent of its star, Henry Cavill. It has more in common with the original 1967 version The dirty dozen then with Tarantino’s postmodern take on it.
The Ministry of Unfriendly WarfareThe premise of Winston Churchill himself (Rory Kinnear) is that he orders a deniable black-ops mission to a neutral West African port, with the aim of destroying the supply lines feeding the Nazi U-boats crossing the Atlantic Ocean have in their stranglehold. This actually happened; it was called Operation Postmasterand Ritchie’s film is based on Damien Lewis’ non-fiction book about it. Many of the characters in the film, including Cavill’s Captain Gus March-Phillipps, are real people, but the story is very heavily fictionalized.
In Ritchie’s version, March-Phillipps is an unruly loose cannon who just happens to have the perfect manners of the old Etonian that he is. (The real March-Phillipps was supposedly one of Ian Fleming’s models for James Bond; Slow horsesFreddie Fox plays Fleming in the film, in his time as a naval intelligence officer.) March-Phillipps is tasked with assembling a commando team of similarly reckless ne’er-do-wells to carry out Churchill’s plan. He assembles a group whose chiseled looks and extreme muscle definition are matched only by their impeccable vocals.
Photo: Dan Smith/Lionsgate via Everett Collection
In reality, they’re a more forgettable group than is ideal for a film like this, with the exception of gigantic actor Alan Ritchson (Reacher) as Anders Lassen – though he’s memorable for both good and bad reasons. Ritchson’s brutal fight scenes are among the film’s greatest pleasures, but the film’s biggest shock comes when you realize he’ll be using that awful Danish accent for the entire story.
There isn’t much more to say about this extremely simple film. There is a sadistic Nazi villain, played by Til Schweiger. There are a pair of fearless spies (Eiza González and Babs Olusanmokun) who almost have more to do than the commandos themselves, and definitely have more charisma. Kinnear underestimates Churchill, and unfortunately so does his makeup. Ritchie includes one of those rather sad scenes trying to set up a movie franchise that you know will never happen.
The dialogue (from Ritchie and three other screenwriters) is lumpy and unconvincing, but that’s not why anyone watches a movie like this. It’s a romp, disposable but solidly made, with satisfyingly blunt action sequences framed by a true master. Lots of things blow up, Ritchson kills many a Nazi, and Cavill sticks his tongue out while firing a machine gun. (Remember when he fired with one hand while leaning out of a helicopter Mission: Impossible – Fallout? Has anyone other than Arnie looked better on screen with a machine gun? I do not think so.)
Photo: Dan Smith/Lionsgate via Everett Collection
Unfriendly warfare is a serviceable action film, and its simplicity is, paradoxically, the most interesting thing about it. At one point, Cavill persuades a local African warlord (Danny Sapani) to join his mission, mainly by pointing out that they both went to Eton. Their connection is fraught with social, racial, and colonial baggage, but Ritchie turns it into nothing more than a celebration of this age-old brotherhood of privileged bullies. Old Etonians know when something just isn’t cricket, and they’ll damn well roll up their sleeves and slaughter anyone who gets in their way if that’s what it takes, won’t they, old chap?
Forgive me; as a Brit who has lived for the past fourteen years under the casually brutal rule of… precisely this race As a straight-talking, stiff-upper-lipped, overgrown schoolboy, I can do without it. Unfriendly warfare modernizes and diversifies the archetype’s self-aggrandizing narrative a bit, but without really exploring it. Ritchie seems happy to have found a simple, harmonized historical origin for his masculine ideal of well-bred thugs – not to mention all that problematic stuff about Empire.
He can do better. I prefer his current Netflix series The gentlemen, an adaptation of his 2019 film about a young duke who discovers that his inherited estate has a profitable marijuana farm attached to it. That series is equally obsessed with the clash of class and violence; in the first episode, “Refined Aggression,” Giancarlo Esposito delivers a speech—almost a manifesto—that perfectly captures the Ritchie aesthetic. (“People survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo; few recognize the significance of the paradoxical reconciliation of the two.”) Netflix’s The gentlemen is usually played for broad comedy and suspense. But in its modern setting it finds some interesting, inverted power dynamics among its cast of toffs, gangsters and ruthless money men – and it’s almost satirical in the way it portrays them.
Guy Ritchie knows his patch. In The gentlemen, he thoroughly rakes it through and comes up with new material. In The Ministry of Unfriendly Warfare, he retreats into his comforting lies to tell another story about guys who are a little naughty and really good at killing. Both projects are entertaining enough while they last, but only one is worth thinking about in retrospect.
The Ministry of Unfriendly Warfare is now available for rental or purchase at Amazon, Vuduand other digital platforms, and so on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K SteelBook.