Movie Review: 'The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' Starring Henry Cavill

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)

Directed by Guy Ritchie

Written by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie

Starring Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Eiza Gonzalez

Release Date April 19th, 2024

Published April 23rd, 2024

It's the flippancy of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare that rubs me the wrong way. I feel like we've grown so used to minimizing the dangers of war and the real risk of life and limb, that we risk removing the human element from war entirely. The new Guy Ritchie movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare plays a role in this dehumanization by taking a mostly true story and rendering it something akin to the Quentin Tarentino fantasy of Inglorious Basterds, minus the artistry. Tarentino side steps the flippant reimagining of World War 2 because he's not working from a 'based on a true story' archetype. The featured protagonists of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare were very real and really risked everything for their country.

To take their story and render it like some action movie fantasy feels like a disservice that denigrates the genuine bravery and hardship of these real life heroes. These men, and one woman, didn't do what they did to be cool, they did it because it needed to be done. Rendering them as shallow action movie stock characters removes their complexity and humanity. This is the kind of needless revisionism that is obscuring real history far too often and despite my appreciation for the actors and the mostly solid direction of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, I can't fully enjoy or appreciate the film because the real story is way more interesting to me than the action movie tropes of the movie.

Henry Cavill portrays Gus March-Phillips, a wild eyed Englishman with a taste for the finer things and a willingness to get his hands dirty. As we meet him, Gus has been in jail for repeated instances of insubordination. He's a menace to commanding officers and politicians alike. He's perfect for the job to be assigned to him, one that cannot be directly overseen by anyone. Gus' mission involves crippling the Nazi supply chain for U-Boats and thus opening the ocean for the Americans to enter the war. It's an entirely off the books mission as Winston Churchill's top military brass don't believe such a mission is possible, it violates the code of an ethical war.

Thus, Gus and his team are assembled in secret by General Gubbins (Cary Elwes) who advises Gus that if his team is caught by the Nazis, they will die and if they are caught by the English Navy, they will be arrested. Now, about Gus' team. Anders Larsson (Alan Ritschson) is a brutish Swedish man whose pasttime is killing Nazis. Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is the son of a very good friend of Gus's from back in the day. He keeps Hayes close to keep an eye on him but he's also a whiz with guns and explosives. Speaking of explosives, Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding) knows everything when it comes to blowing things up. He's been in and out of prisons across Europe for blowing things up for fun and profit.

Rounding out Gus' team is the mastermind, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer). He's risked his life to get the intel that will give England this fighting chance. However, Appleyard is currently in Nazi custody and Gus and his team will have to risk the entire mission to save him. Meanwhile, a pair of spies, Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) and Marjorie Stewart (Eiza Gonzalez), are already on the ground in Africa where the mission will commence. Stewart will need to seduce and distract the head Nazi in charge, Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweigher), while avoiding becoming a victim of his sadistic approach to women.

That's the basics of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. It's a lot of characters and moving parts that boils down to a lot of bullets and piles of dead Nazis. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, I hate Nazis as well. That caveat out of the way, it's incredibly reductive to the legend of what actually happened. The flippant comic performances of Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, and the rest removes any seriousness from the movie. Ritchie renders our main characters impervious to bullets and completely fearless in the face of danger and thus it feels as if the stakes are much lower than they are.

I'm not asking for documentary levels of Verisimilitude, but this is a remarkable true story and Ritchie directs it like he's making a comic book action film. Perhaps you can argue that the ending of the movie will inspire people to seek out the true story, and that would be great if that happened, but Ritchie's irreverent take on this true story, for me, appears as damaging to the truth as it is a tribute to what really happened. The Guy Ritchie style of action and verbose, indestructible anti-heroes is too broad for this material. Everything feels offhand and the real danger and the truth of what is happening is replaced with a pop revenge fantasy.

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