By Nick Nitkowski

There are plenty of times when I look forward to seeing a Guy Ritchie movie. One of my favorite recent releases from him is “The Gentlemen” not to mention his classics like “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.” However, not all of his films are hits. Not to say that they are bad films. They genuinely lean more on the side of “okay.” Now he has a new WWII action spy film being led my Henry Cavil. Only question is which side of Guy Ritchie’s spectrum will this film land on?

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” Guy Ritchie’s latest film and is based on a classified mission organized by Winston Chruchill in WWII that was declassified in 2016 and follows a rogue crew of renegades as they fight against the Nazis. If that sounds a little familiar, that’s probably because we’ve seen so many films like this. But with films like these, it’s not so much the story that’s important, it’s all about execution.

Now, while I was watching this movie, there were moments where it reminded me of another preexisting film. It reminded me a lot of “Inglorious Bastards.” However, “Inglorious Bastards” was clearly a work of fiction from the start while this one is based on a real secret mission with real people that existed. Still, with the way the film was executed, I couldn’t help be see the parallels between the two films. And in that sense, the action in this film is very fun to watch. I mean, who doesn’t love seeing Nazi’s getting their comeuppance? Funny enough, Til Schweiger who played Hugo Stiglitz in “Inglorious Bastards” now plays the Nazi villain of this film, which I found to be hilariously ironic.

Speaking of actors, Henry Cavill easily carries this movie. He’s obviously great as the leading man and both he and Alan Ritchson provide most of the film’s action and humor while it mostly feels like everyone else is just along for the ride. There is an interwoven side story in the film and it honestly took me out of the film a few times when we had to cut back to them. I was mainly wanting the story to focus more on the main rogues. Sure, the side story is important for the story overall, but I found it to be less interesting.

I’ve seen a lot of Guy Ritchie’s movies and while some of them are great, some tend to fall short and to me, this is a movie that had the potential to be great but just fell short resulting in it being good but not great. The main issue of this is the amount of downtime between action sequences. The movie clocks in right at 2 hours, but I feel as though it would have benefited from an hour and forty-five minutes. There were parts that could have been trimmed down to help the pacing of the movie. Especially from the side story that I wasn’t too fond of.

Overall, the movie had plenty of enjoyable moments but unfortunately was bogged down by slow moments which keeps this film from being great in my opinion. However, it still has memorable action sequences and a decent amount of humor that is sure to appease the general movie goer. And it may provide some interesting insights for WWII historians. For me personally, it didn’t quite rise to the level it could have reached, but it didn’t entirely miss its mark.

3.5 stars