It's like they think everyone in Great Britain talks like a
dowager duchess, instead of a bunch of slappers
dir: Guy Ritchie
2024
Pish-posh fiddle-faddle jibber-jabber chuckaboo collie-shangies toodle-pip dimber-damber nanty narking whooperups.
All those interjections existed before I existed or wrote them down, and they’re actual phrases dating from the Victorian era, when Victoria ruled much of the world, apparently. Somehow, for reasons beyond me, this is the cartoonish level of flimflammery that Guy Ritchie, a Brit himself, chooses to use in order to tell and sell a story about some chaps who gave the Germans what-for, during the war.
It is a completely fake version of Britishness that Brits happily still recreate in truest pantomime form for movies they hope to “sell” to American audiences, predominately.
Everyone’s always asking for tea. People talk about cricket. Characters who would otherwise have working class accents have posh accents, and vice versa. The Germans won’t know or understand what hit them.
That this film is based around an actual thing that happened during the war doesn’t make any of it look or feel any less cartoonish, and that some of these chaps played by Henry Cavill, Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Carey Elwes actually existed. But we’re not meant to mutter “that never fucking happened” under our breaths while watching this movie any more than we were while watching Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds back in 2009.
2009? Fucking hell, time does fly. My adult-sized kid was but a toddler when that came out, and those of us who enjoyed it thrilled to the transgressive action of a bunch of Nazis, including the highest ups, getting their just deserts at the hands of Brad Pitt and his merry band of pranksters.
Surely what held true there holds true here: watching Nazis being slaughtered is almost always delightful. And I am happy to say it still holds true for most of this flick too. Fuck those Nazis, and fuck the contemporary ones as well: May they all enjoy a similar fate.
Nazis being slaughtered on film is the one unambiguously enjoyable enemy everyone can enjoy watching taking a bullet, arrow or knife to the face.
This entire film is predicated on the fact that, beyond the necessity of what Our Heroes are trying to achieve, along the way we’re going to see hundreds of Nazis meeting their maker, and we will enjoy it as long as the people doing it are these toodle-pip Biggles and “Oh I Say!” types of British stereotypes that have populated movies for the last 70 years.
So if we are watching a group of admittedly very handsome chaps casually stroll around shooting Nazis in the head with silenced weapons, without working up much of a sweat, and only occasionally having to get grubby by stabbing them, we’re going to enjoy it and then go eat cucumber sandwiches afterwards.
There’s even a scene where someone feels compelled to say, when they’ve bailed a Nazi up but run out of bullets in their gun, “Sorry old chap, but would you mind terribly if I borrowed this?” before nabbing their victim’s knife and stabbing them to death with it.
How perfectly wonderful. What an awfully big adventure they’re all on.
And even Churchill (Rory Kinnear) himself is in on the fun! Of all the scenes in this film that never happened in real life, I like to think that the one where the heads of the admiralty, the army, the civil service and, I dunno, the guy in charge of Young Elizabeth’s corgis, all pull Churchill aside and tell him in 1941 that he should surrender to Hitler, has to be the cherry on top.
Churchill, who was apparently a patriotic and combative sort, tells them “Nah,” So then some chap they call M (Carey Elwes) and a young chap that they keep calling Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) all the time, in case the viewer is 8 and doesn’t get it, get some rascal, some ne’er-do-well, some absolute bounder called Gus (Cavill) out of some deepest darkest prison, and then they tell him he has to save the world from Hitler.
Gus, with a massive beard and most excellent waxed and curly mustachios, starts stealing everything in front of him, and the people watching him do it notice, but can’t do anything about it, apparently.
He announces what he needs, who he needs, and how they’re going to do it. And something like “your coat would look really good on me” before manfully striding out of the place while wearing it.
Cavill is playing something here, and I’m not entirely sure what it is. He delivers every line of dialogue without separating his upper teeth from his lower teeth, so everything sounds like it was squeezed out of the buttocks of a very posh butler.
There are a bunch of characters, just like in most films, but I’m not sure it really matters, or that they all need to be enumerated. They all play nicely together, play minor variations on stereotypes, and get the job done adequately.
Mostly, the flick splits into the stealthy-explodey war action part, and the sneaky espionage-y part assayed by Eiza Gonzalez and Babs Olusanmokun as Marjorie Stewart and Richard Herron. The spy bit involves travelling to a place called Fernando Po off the coast of West Africa, and setting the stage for the main force of specialist murderers to get there and blow up a ship. Blowing up the Italian ship would really help the Americans get into the war, because their planes can’t cross the Atlantic Ocean, apparently. Nazi submarines rule the Atlantic, and none shall pass.
Unless Gus and his mooks can get the job done. I genuinely think the film works best before the last half hour, which kind of drops the ball. The way the various interactions with Nazis just begging to be killed work in the lead up kinda falls apart by the end as they try to rush the finish because I’m guessing they lost interest or ran out of money or something, anything to explain how lackluster it becomes.
Marjorie, played by an American, speaks all sorts of languages and is awfully charming, but I think she’s in it as a Mata Hari type spy, at least as intended. None of that really translates, because her main job is meant to be seducing the Nazi leader of the island, played by Til Schweiger, who really doesn’t come across like he likes women at all. He really does seem like he loves torturing people to death, though.
She sort of seduces him by intriguing him with a battle of wits through riddles, and it comes off as strange and off-putting, as if Guy Ritchie wanted to confirm with absolute certainty that he really doesn’t like writing for or directing women in movies. And this will be a strange thing for me to say, but it’s all so surprisingly sexless. Not that I wanted sex scenes or whatever between leathery old Schweiger and Gonzalez (bleugh), but, you know, something.
She has more chemistry with her compatriot Herron, who is so clearly modelled on Rick from Casablanca, with his own bar and smuggling business. There isn’t a scene where he tells someone to play As time goes by on the piano, but you just know it’s in the deleted scenes somewhere. A hack of Ritchie’s proportions could not have resisted the impulse.
The scenes on the train, interweaving with the Nazis as they are, lifting stuff then returning it, are well handled and have a tension to them. That makes for enjoyable viewing, for me.
Also, the attack on a prison to rescue one of their number is set up, and comes together pretty well. There was a bit of tension there, as we wonder whether they’re going to be able to take down most of the Nazis before other people notice. One of the chaps, played by the massive Alan Ritchson, kills people with his bow and arrows. The first time he kills a guard from a couple of hundred metres away, it’s shocking, it’s funny, it’s precise. By the time they’re done at the prison, arrows he’s shot through one chap have also killed another guard. That’s when you go “oh, okay, now I get it.”
Over an hour later we will have watched the heroes kill three hundred Nazis so casually, so effortlessly, with absolutely no casualties on their side of things, and perhaps succeed in all their objectives with such ease that you could think “well, that last half hour didn’t feel like anything”. But the important thing is, it ends when it does. Two hours, thanks, and no change. If this had been bloated out by another half hour or more I would have fucking hated it.
I thought it was all right. I thought the Kinnear performance as Churchill was particularly horrible. Like, every middle aged British actor eventually gets to play the bloated racist sack of crap, but most of them do a better job than what I saw yesterday.
Everyone else does adequately with an adequate script, that at best manages to be amusing without being that funny. It thinks it’s got a witty script, but it’s really single line waffling that passes close enough for wit that it will do. My two “favourite” scenes involve Marjorie: in the first she proves she’s a deadeye marksman with almost all weapons, and for some berserk reason seems like she’s about to throw a grenade which prompts the only emotional reaction any characters experience during the whole flick.
The second involves her rendition of Mack the Knife, which of course was Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. It’s not that she sings it well or anything, but the reaction from the Nazi commandant is absolutely priceless, as he explains to an underling as to how she fucked up.
When I say it’s hilarious, I’m not even going to explain why, but I’m sure it’s one of many instances where Guy Ritchie, blasting rails of coke with the other screenwriters, sat back, wiped his nose, snorted a few dozen times, typed the dialogue down and then bellowed “that shit is pure gold, mate.”
Yeah. Sure, Jan, I mean, Guy.
I actually found it a bit funny that in the wrap up at the end with the text onscreen telling us what medals the various people won or who married who that most of these chaps would be dead before the war ended, and that Big Gus himself, after marrying the delightful Marjorie, would die within a year on his next mission. Would a dose of reality have been too sobering, Mr Ritchie, in a story pretending to be about a real mission and a real group of heroes?
It’s all a bit of a laugh, without actually being funny, but some people, being middle-aged dads, will really get a thrill out of this if they didn’t fall asleep half way through.
6 times Henry Cavill has movie star looks with costume-wearing theme park attendant acting ability out of 10
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“If Hitler isn't playing by the Rules, then neither shall we?” – warfare was never gentlemanly - The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
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