Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
Guy Ritchie’s career trajectory is bizarre, to say the least. He started off making vibrant, wholly British crime comedies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, then he flirted with bigger Hollywood productions like Swept Away and RockNRolla before spending a decade working on blockbusters like Sherlock Holmes and Disney’s Aladdin remake. Likely burnt out by these expensive, time-consuming projects, he has now gone back to making films on a smaller scale, reuniting with friends like Jason Statham to make fun throwbacks to his earlier films.
Unfortunately, his latest endeavour (the oddly-titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) is a new low for Ritchie, likely his weakest film since 2005’s convoluted Revolver. Gone is the clever wit of The Gentlemen or Wrath of Man’s non-linear structure: this is a wannabe Mission: Impossible, a globetrotting adventure that looks and feels like a commercial for gambling websites rather than a theatrical feature film.
Ritchie has never shied away from his influences, and his homage to the opening of 1967’s Point Blank in the first minutes is probably the only well-directed and well-edited scene in the entire film. The plot is painfully banal and trite: a group of special agents headed by the stoic Statham (named Orson Fortune, thus explaining half of the baffling title of the picture) has to go undercover to stop the sale of world-threatening weapons. It is as serviceable a premise as they come, but it is downright embarrassing how wasted it is.
Other movies tend to have cool action sequences, nail-biting scenes where the agents risk losing their cover, and ticking-bomb elements that keep rising the stakes and the tension. None of this is present in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Every dialogue scene is lit and shot in very basic ways, with most of the actors saying their lines as if they just read the script for the first time. Almost everyone in the cast looks miserable to be here, with only Aubrey Plaza as one of the agents bringing some of her natural charms despite having very little to do. Even Josh Hartnett, who plays a famous actor “hired” (i.e. blackmailed) by Fortune to befriend a billionaire (played by Hugh Grant, a new staple in Ritchie’s roster of friends) interested in buying the weapons, ends up feeling more like an afterthought.
Virtually every element of the plot feels rushed, and even then the pacing is tediously long and stretched out. The dynamic between Hartnett and Grant is intriguing, but it gets around 10 minutes of screen time (and an admittedly cute mid-credits scene). Meanwhile, most of the film is spent following Jason Statham moping around and karate chopping baddies in the throat, his eyes completely lifeless as if just going through the motions of what he did in Mechanic: Resurrection.
Where is the fun writing of Snatch? What happened to the vibrant, energetic editing of Sherlock Holmes? How did Ritchie go from the economical Wrath of Man to this bloated mess? Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is the most hollow film of the British filmmaker alongside the laughably bad Swept Away, a vampire that drained the blood out of every creative in front and behind the camera to make a cheap and interminable spy “comedy” that has no laughs and zero thrills. Hopefully the upcoming straight-to-Prime The Covenant will be a simpler, stripped-back war film.