- UK release: July 2024 (Prime Video)
- Director: Guy Ritchie · Writers: Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie
- Studio / distributor: Jerry Bruckheimer Films; Black Bear; Lionsgate
- Genre: Second World War action comedy / covert-operations caper · Runtime: 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Source: Churchill’s Secret Warriors by Damien Lewis
- Main cast: Henry Cavill (Man of Steel, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) as Gus March-Phillipps; Eiza González (Baby Driver) as Marjorie Stewart; Alan Ritchson (Fast X) as Anders Lassen; Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike, I Am Number Four) as Geoffrey Appleyard
- IMDb: 6.8 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 68% critics / 91% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Guy Ritchie has spent the last few years quietly becoming the most reliable maker of mid-budget men-on-a-mission pictures working today. The Gentlemen gave him a London criminal ecosystem to play in, Wrath of Man sharpened him up, and The Covenant showed he could carry real weight when the material asked for it. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the loosest and most purely enjoyable of the recent run: a true-ish story about the unofficial commando outfit Churchill set loose on the Nazi war machine, told with the swagger of a heist film and very little intention of being a serious history lesson.
The setup
Britain is losing the war at sea, German U-boats are throttling the Atlantic supply lines, and the official channels have run out of polite ideas. Enter a small, deniable team of misfits, led by Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill), licensed by a shadow ministry to do the things gentlemen are not supposed to do: sabotage, theft, and a great deal of close-quarters killing. Their target is a fortified port off the West African coast, where sinking the right ships could break the U-boat fleet’s grip. Around the raid runs a parallel infiltration plot, with an agent working the enemy from inside a colonial outpost while the muscle gets into position. It is a real operation, dressed up and given a swing-band tempo, and the film never pretends otherwise.
The cast
Cavill is having the time of his life. Freed from the solemnity of franchise leads, he plays March-Phillipps as a bearded, pipe-puffing rogue with a glint that suggests he finds the whole war faintly amusing, and the looseness suits him better than anything since The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Alan Ritchson, fresh off making Reacher a streaming fixture, is the standout: his Danish commando Anders Lassen is a grinning psychopath with a bow and a deep dislike of Nazis, and Ritchson plays him with the gleeful menace the part needs. Eiza González gets the trickiest job, carrying the infiltration strand on poise and nerve rather than firepower, and she sells the danger of a woman charming men she intends to destroy. Alex Pettyfer is the steady hand whose capture sets the mission moving, and Henry Golding, Cary Elwes and Babs Olusanmokun fill out the edges with the easy charisma the film trades in.
The craft
This is Ritchie in caper mode, not war-film mode. Ed Wild’s photography keeps the palette warm and the framing clean, the action is staged for clarity rather than chaos, and Chris Benstead’s score leans into brassy, almost playful menace. There is real violence here, and the BBFC has not handed out a 15 for nothing, but the tone stays buoyant: throats are cut and hearts removed with the same wink Ritchie brings to a card game gone wrong. The editing has his familiar snap, scenes ending a beat before you expect, dialogue clipped and quotable. At two hours it occasionally coasts, and the infiltration plot is more interesting than the climactic dock-side shooting, but the pacing rarely sags for long. It is handsome, confident, and entirely unbothered by realism.
How it stacks up
The obvious shadow over this is Inglourious Basterds, another stylised fantasy of killing Nazis with relish, and the comparison does Ritchie no favours on ambition, though his film is the breezier watch. The deeper lineage is The Dirty Dozen and the classic ensemble-mission picture, the kind where half the pleasure is the roll-call of specialists and the planning of the job. It also makes an interesting double bill with Operation Mincemeat, released a couple of years back, which covered adjacent secret-war history with a straighter face: where that film whispered, this one struts. Against Ritchie’s own work, it has the team chemistry of The Gentlemen without the plotting density, and the bruising competence of The Covenant without the moral weight.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critics have come in mixed-positive, sitting around 68%, with the common note that it is handsome and watchable but a touch generic, less distinctive than Ritchie at his sharpest. Audiences are far warmer, up at 91%, and I am with them. This is the gap that opens whenever a film sets out to be fun rather than important: reviewers mark it down for not reaching, while the people who wanted a good Friday-night romp got exactly that. The IMDb crowd land around 6.8, which feels about right for a film nobody will call a masterpiece and few will regret watching.
Verdict
I came for wartime espionage, an ensemble caper and Guy Ritchie banter, and the film delivered all three without fuss. It is not trying to rewrite the genre or interrogate the morality of irregular warfare; it wants to be entertaining, and it is, with a cast plainly enjoying themselves and a director who knows precisely how to land a swaggering set-piece. The espionage strand and the team dynamic are the rewatchable parts, the bits I would happily put on again. It is a notch below Ritchie’s best and a long way above the algorithm-filler it could have been. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Prime Video in the UK from 25 July 2024, after a cinema run elsewhere. A weekend watch that rewards a second look.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled in as one of Ritchie’s better-liked recent pictures, the kind that finds a long second life on streaming rather than at the box office, where its UK cinema skip and modest theatrical take elsewhere kept it under the radar. It remains on Prime Video, and the appetite for a follow-up or a Ritchie-flavoured war series has only grown given how comfortably the cast slotted into the format.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, injury detail. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent bloody shootings, stabbings and throat slashings in actions sequences, which often have a darkly comic tone. Hand to hand combat includes punches, shoves and kicks. There are also explosions and bombings.
Injury detail: Characters are left splashed with blood in the aftermath of violence and there is occasional focus on bloody corpses and injury detail, such as slashed throats. A man cuts into the chest of another off-screen, pulling his bloody heart out and lifting it into view; there is a blackly comic context to this scene.
Additional issues: There are references to the racism and antisemitism of the Nazi movement; discrimination is implicitly condemned throughout. In a disturbing scene, characters see a naked woman hanging by her wrists having, it is implied, been tortured to death. Characters are threatened with torture and death. There are scenes of gun threat and tense sequences in which undercover agents are at risk of discovery. A woman experiences brief sexual harassment from a drunk soldier, but his behaviour forms part of her plan during a secret mission and she never appears to be at real risk. There are occasional moderate sex references as characters flirt with one another, and a villainous character is described as having ‘perversions’. There is infrequent strong language (‘f**k’), along with milder terms which include ‘bugger’, ‘bloody’, ‘hell’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’ and ‘God’. Characters smoke and drink alcohol plentifully, in the context of the historic setting.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
