The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare tries hard to be a rag-tag action film with a roguish, rugged charm. Based (however loosely) on the book Churchill’s Secret Warriors by Damien Lewis, about the small group of fighters covertly deployed by the British military during World War II, the film depicts Operation Postmaster. Postmaster was a mission to steal three German cargo ships that provided essential supplies for the Nazi U-boats. As the movie tells it, the U-boats were vital to the German’s control over the Atlantic Ocean, and thus cause for reticence when it came to the United States’ decision to join the War.

The film tries hard, and you can feel it. You can feel the four screenwriters – some possibly brought in simply for punching up the quips – producing the dialogue. You can hear the hope for laughter in the actors’ line deliveries. Sometimes, the comedic bits are clever enough, serviceable. In most cases, though, the punchlines land fairly thuddingly between cacophonous hails of gunfire.

On this latter point, for a crew of supposed covert operatives, the spies of Operation Postmaster are not very discreet when it comes to infiltration. The majority of set pieces establish some amount of stealthily planning, but in every case this quickly devolves into machine guns erupting and dozens upon dozens of Nazis biting it. Now, a film “based on a true story” need not be letter accurate in its representation of events (they never are, as a matter of fact). In this instance, however, it would have been preferrable to stick closer to the real story, where far less people were gunned down in meathead-level action scenes.

Guy Ritchie is entirely capable of composing quality action sequences. Some of the ones in here are entertaining on that shut-off-the-brain level. But the spectacle sours into tedium as the fascinating real-life story is consistently replaced with monotonous violence. Plus, it is difficult to take a movie seriously when it includes a man skewering Nazis together with a bow and arrow. For most of the runtime, we are not asked to take The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare that seriously anyway. Then, in the final scene and a series of end title cards, we are suddenly called upon to valorize these characters’ real-life counterparts, as though the film had done the yeoman’s work of presenting them as heroes that history almost forgot. I’m not convinced the characters in Ritchie’s film are those heroes, so I’m not convinced by the ending, either.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)