Review of the movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Guy Ritchie, who has often been compared to Quentin Tarantino before, has made a movie that cannot escape comparisons to Inglourious Basterds. Unlike the latter, which was a completely fictional story (not so much an alternative reality as a deliberately bloody tale of “history,” sometimes daring, sometimes funny, sometimes genuinely scary), The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is based entirely on real events and a real operation led by Churchill (and it is interesting that Til Schweiger starred in both films, but in Tarantino’s he portrayed one of the inglorious vigilantes who scalped Nazis, and in Ritchie’s he portrayed the central Nazi).

The action takes place at the beginning of the Second World War, when Hitler was still offering England a peace deal, but he was doing so, of course, from a position of brazen power, and the House of Lords unanimously sought to accept the Nazi proposal, unlike Winston Churchill, who immediately considered the Fuhrer a mad sadistic fanatic who could not be trusted. At the time, Nazi submarines were occupying the coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean so that American humanitarian ships could not reach British ports, and the prime minister was well aware that if the sea lanes were not cleared, American military aid would not arrive.

It was then that Churchill, risking his chair, created the secret Office of Special Operations to conduct unauthorized espionage and sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied Europe. And since the Germans were playing cunningly, insidiously, dishonestly, and not according to the rules (for example, they deployed their ships in the waters of “neutral” Spain, which were not to be attacked), Churchill also allowed himself to act outside the law.

So in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (the title speaks for itself, although the protagonist, played by Henry Cavill, still refers to his team exclusively as “gentlemen”), we are told and shown how Churchill gathered a small group of people (“unfriendly to rules” and “allergic” to official orders) to get to the Spanish coast on a fishing boat under the guise of “civilian Swedish sailors” and blow up two German tugs and one Italian ship, the Duchess. The ship was carrying submarine equipment, including much-needed air filters, without which Nazi submarines in the Atlantic would have to surface and become exposed and vulnerable to attacks by British destroyers.

Historically and thematically, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is in the same “harbor” as the 2021 British film Operation Mincemeat, which tells the story of another equally real and daring special operation under Churchill’s “wing” that aimed to misinform the Germans and conceal the Allied invasion of Sicily with the help of a false coded message and a single… drowned corpse. Both films, by the way, feature the character of Ian Fleming, only, of course, performed by different actors, that is, the same Fleming who was a real British spy and later became a writer-author of fictional spy novels about James Bond.

However, stylistically, in mood and character, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a stubborn and scrappy, wild and psychotic film that kills Nazis in the same unit as Lieutenant Aldo Rein and other “inglorious bastards.” And it can be said that Henry Cavill’s character rhymes with Brad Pitt’s, with Christoph Waltz’s Standartenführer Hans Landa being the antagonist in the person of Schweiger, and Aisa Gonzalez’s character, who is both a Jewish vigilante and a recruited actress on a special mission, is both Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) and movie star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

Just as Tarantino, while addressing a supposedly serious war story and a sensitive Jewish theme, remained Quentin Tarantino, i.e., he fully preserved his creative authorial self in the film, so Guy Ritchie remained completely true to himself. So you shouldn’t raise your eyebrows when you hear a dialog between two spies trying to combine a heavy willingness to sacrifice themselves for a good cause with a little hedonism, about an “unappetizing” dilemma that will end either with a British victory and a single menu of fish and chips, or a German victory and a single menu of sausages and cabbage. Similarly, one should not raise an eyebrow when a pirate-aristocrat on the side of the good guys says that he “hates the Nazis not for Nazism, but for rudeness.” The main thing is that he hates them.

In terms of charm, the first and second places in the team of “Ritchie’s Freaks” are taken by the burly and the huge: Henry Cavill, a major discharged from court martial who, “on the carpet” of the top military leadership, instead of the offered cup of tea, is unceremoniously “treated” to scotch, cigars, grabs a lighter and “accepts as a gift” the coat taken off the brigadier after saying “I wish I had a coat like that…”; and the star of the TV series Reacher, Alan Ritchson, a tall and broad Danish blond who fought bears in the forest as a child and now cuts and pierces Aryan beasts with arrows and always smiles kindly. The least charismatic strategist, played by Alex Pettyfer, is the one who seems superfluous and unnecessary (and rescued from Nazi captivity in vain) until he comes up with a strategic idea.

There is one fundamental difference between Inglourious Basterds and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The former openly lies about historical events, but does so in a way that makes the story seem almost real, or at least one that all anti-fascist fibers want to believe. The second, on the contrary, tells the truth, but in such a way that it is impossible to believe, at least in the way it is presented. But in both cases, the time spent exterminating the caricatured Nazis is playful and tasteful.