HOLLYWOOD—I really thought I might get a fun action flick with “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” but it is not the flick that people expect it to be. Is the audience given a string of odd, eccentric, and one-of-a-kind characters? Without a doubt, but that alone does not make a compelling movie if the narrative is not enthralling to capture the viewers attention.
Director Guy Ritchie has always been known to have his hands on crafty and oddball flicks that don’t always get notoriety. Think “Snatch,” “Sherlock Holmes” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” to name a few, however, even those flicks I found a bit more compelling than this snorefest. What is the problem with “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare?” There is very little if any action in this movie! It is being sold as an action-flick and it is more of a mystery-thriller. The movie kicks off with action in its opening sequence, has a little bit near the middle and doesn’t fully kick the action into gear until like the final 20 minutes of the movie and by that time, I was already checked out.
This is quite disappointing and for a bevy of reasons that I can’t believe I’m laying out. For starters, you have an all-star cast of action heroes and some wannabe action stars. I mean we have Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Henry Golding, Cary Elwes and Eiza Gonzalez. Out of all the male leads, Ritchson was the standout with his character Anders Lassen. He is studious, yet hilarious and not afraid to shoot an arrow at an obstacle in a heartbeat. Cavill just felt as he was playing himself, why Pettyfer was in this movie I will never know and Golding I completely forgot about him.
The movie spends an enormous amount of time focused on Gonzalez’s character, Marjorie Stewart, who spins a significant amount of time to seduce Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger), the SS commander of charge. Look the film deals with a dicey subject involving a group of misfits aiming to halt Hitler and Nazi Germany from taking over the United Kingdom. It is hard to put laughter into such a serious subject which I think the movie does at times well, but well enough to make me become invested and to care, not so much.
The characters are not developed enough to make me care and that is the major problem. I should be invested in some of these characters, but there are so many they are all eating away at the screen vying for a moment and that takes away from the overall chemistry of the misfits. No one truly stands out and the story alone while captivating comes across a bit too hooky and silly for the viewer to take it serious.
“The Ministry of the Ungentlemanly Warfare” misses the mark big time on a movie that could have been exiting, something out of the norm and delivered a bit of history in a way that not many people grasp. It could have done things to not only entertain, but to educate, but instead it just bored and frustrated me to a point that I couldn’t wait for the film to end. When the last 20 minutes of the movie are the most entertaining in a nearly two-hour flick, you have a major problem.
