The Duds Of Navarone

A reverent flick from irreverent auteur Guy Ritchie? The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is an oddly straightlaced, strangely flat ode to WWII secret-mission movies, where the Nazis are always bad and the Brit-lead black-ops troops are unfailingly badass. Thirstily touting itself as “based on a true story” of Churchill breaking the Nazi U-boat lock on the North Atlantic Ocean, this exhausting exercise in Greatest-Generation derring-do goes off-book fast.

THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Written by: Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie
Starring: Henry Cavill, Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Babs Olusanmokun, Henry Golding, Cary Elwes
Running time: 120 mins

Sassy antics, cartoonish cohorts, and simplistic storylines dumb down the promising premise of a presumably actual raid that changed history. Imagine The Guns of Navarone, but made by the laddie director behind Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It’s a strained effort to be a patriotic period piece that comes across as both too cheeky and not cheeky enough. If you’re really going to indulge trigger-pumping, knife-plunging, arrow-slinging mayhem, why gussy it up as a glossy historical homage? Just embrace the gonzo riff instead of toning down the cocky insanity. Henry Cavill clearly tried, when he strafes a slew of Nazis while sticking out his tongue—an improv that the director inexplicably keeps almost as a token gesture. 

Cavill plays Gus March-Phillipps, a snide soldier whose bushy beard has a olde-tyme mustache that curls up at the edges. He’s the sort of irreverent rogue who fills his belly with Scotch and his pockets with cigars during top-secret meetings at Special Operations headquarters in London. Also present at the meeting: Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox), who was so inspired by March-Phillipps and his merry band of marauders that he created the James Bond franchise. Don’t know how he saw a suave secret agent in the antics of this burly brute, but sure.

March-Phillipps is the tip of the spear for Operation Postmaster, an “unsanctioned, unofficial, unauthorized” plan to sabotage the supply chain that provides German submarines with food, munitions, and—most importantly—the carbon dioxide filters that allow the U-Boat crew to breathe in their deadly submersible. The scheme has the full support of Churchill (Rory Kinnear) but not Parliament, so it has to be hush-hush. 

The main supplier is the Duchessa, an Italian ship docked in the neutral port of Fernando Po, an island off the coast of Nigeria. So March-Phillipps assembles an international crew of irreverent irregulars like munitions expert Freddy “The Frogman” Alvarez (Henry Golding) and Anders “The Danish Hammer” Lassen (Alan Ritchson) a jacked-up Scandinavian with little glasses, a preference for combat archery, and an inexplicable penchant for ripping out Nazi hearts. Wait, what? “I’m not leaving until I have a barrelful of Nazi hearts,” he sneers. Don’t worry, that doesn’t happen.

Leading an advance team is magnetic Mexican actress Eiza González, playing a woman named Marjorie Stewart. Really, people? González is talented, but no amount of acting classes could make her a convincing enough WASP. She’s the Mata Hari bait for Fernando Po’s head Kraut, Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger), a humorless officer who uses flatline pick-up lines like “I want to invite you to a dark Nazi party.” Yikes. Marjorie wins him over when she tells him “I’m a Jew. Kidding!”  

We know that Marjorie is more than just a seductress, since there’s a whole sequence where she bests another man when showing off her wicked facility with at least a half-dozen types of guns. She even blows smoke off the barrel like a sub-Saharan Annie Oakley. Great, so do we see her decimate a bunch of bad guys? No. Not at all. She shoots exactly one bullet into one person at close range. Okay, then, useless gun montage duly noted.

Our intrepid crew sail undercover on a handsome Danish fishing yacht all the way around western Africa. Their plan is to avoid Nazi battleships by heading further out into the Atlantic. But then they have to cut three days off of their schedule when the Nazis accelerate the Duchessa’s departure. Which means they have to sail into the fray and risk being blown up. Very dangerous, they tell us. It’s not, no one bothers them. 

Once at Fernando Po, March-Phillipps plans their attack on the Duchessa coincidentally on the very night that the Germans are getting lit: the Officers’ Costume Party and the Soldier’s Beerfest. Why are they throwing these celebrations? No idea. Why is there apparently a costume store in Fernando Po with Hollywood-quality make-up and clothing for pretty convincing riffs on Cleopatra and Frankenstein? Again, no clue. But it is, and I guess we should go with it, because this is totally based on a true story.

So many Nazis die in this movie, with really very little effort on the part of our unscathed heroes. It feels more like target practice at a certain point, and is just as numbing to watch. Expect digs at German cuisine and how much sausage and black bread suck, plus a lot of Eton cosplay and knowing references to Cricket to make this lowbrow romp feel slightly tonier. At one point, some math whiz declares, “We’re outnumbered 200 to 5!” Why he doesn’t say “40 to 1” is beyond me, but this movie, like its tongue-twister title, likes to think overcomplication is the same as complexity.