You never know what you’re going to get with the recently prolific and always flashy Guy Ritchie these days, whether it’s the audacious and cool live-action “Aladdin” or the star-studded and fantastically entertaining action crime comedy “The Gentlemen” or the ho-hum heist film “Wrath of Man.” Ritchie’s films are almost always going to be stylistically adventurous and filled with colorful, wisecracking characters. The question is, will there be an actual movie of some substance beneath all the high-end gloss?
This time around: not quite.
The awkwardly titled “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” is a mixed bag that plays like a cross between a “Mission: Impossible” movie and “Get Shorty,” and there are some moments of hilariously dark humor and a few nifty fight sequences. But the plot is so convoluted it feels as if chunks of different scripts were all fed into some kind of A.I. blender, with the result being an inconsequential serving of empty cinematic calories. You know how some movies stay with you for days, weeks, months, and sometimes forever? “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” is not that kind of movie.
Let’s get that Trojan Horse of a title out of the way here and now. Ruse de guerre is literally translated as ruse of war, i.e., a trick of the trade involving clever deception, and just about everyone in “Operation Fortune” is involved in some sort of ruse or game or exquisite tomfoolery or double-cross or double-trouble-crisscross. The most notable practitioner is Jason Statham’s ludicrously named Orson Fortune, a private contractor and all-around badass, and in an effort to distinguish this Jason Statham character from a dozen other Jason Statham roles, we’re told Orson is an eccentric bloke with an assortment of neuroses that necessitate him traveling on a spacious private jet, staying in five-star accommodations and consuming obscenely priced red wines. It all sounds like a RUSE to me, but there you have it.
The tired old McGuffin in “Operation Fortune” is a device known as “The Handle.” Whoever gains control of this gizmo will be able to control everything that flows through the grid and thus will have the power to do everything from launching missiles to collapsing the global economy to adding limitless users to their Netflix account. Question: Why are these world-domination techno-thingees still of a physical nature? Also, why doesn’t the inventor of the world-domination techno-thingee make a secret backup, just in case?
Anyway. A British government official named Knighton (Eddie Marsan) hires the operative Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes) to gain possession of The Handle, and Jasmine in turns hires Orson Fortune and assembles a support team for Orson that includes the sharp-shooting and dashing J.J. (Bugzy Malone) and the sardonic American hacker Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza). Their mission, should they choose to accept it, is to infiltrate the good graces and eventually the heavily guarded Turkish villa of the billionaire arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant) before Simmonds can broker a deal that will deliver The Handle to some megalomaniacal entity that will use it for evil, pure evil I tell ya!
Turns out the deeply tanned, notoriously narcissistic Simmonds is a huge star-bleeper, so Orson recruits, i.e., blackmails a Tom Cruise-like mega-action movie star named Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett) to join the team, with Sarah posing as Danny’s girlfriend and Orson pretending to be Danny’s business manager, and before you know it, they’re all at Simmonds’ aforementioned Turkish villa. Along the way, we get some dazzling shots and some fantastic location visuals and, of course, a number of scenes in which Orson dispatches with one hapless henchmen after another. Ritchie and his screenwriting partners Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies spray us with a steady stream of one-liners, including Sarah delivering a famous line from “The Brady Bunch” and a reference to one of Elwes’ most memorable scenes in “The Princess Bride.” It all adds up to nothing, but it’s kinda fun, at least for a while.
The biggest problem with “Operation Fortune” is a lack of identity. It’s not quite pure spoof, but it’s not nearly heavy enough (despite the mounting body count) to be taken even semi-seriously as an action flick. Those little quirks of Orson’s notwithstanding, Jason Statham comports himself as if he’s in a Jason Statham movie, while Hugh Grant is pretty much in his own world and hamming it up as the slimy Simmonds, and the invaluable Aubrey Plaza looks so bored we half-expect her to turn straight to camera and roll her eyes in sympathy with the viewer. (Josh Hartnett is a gamer, essentially poking fun at his own image from a couple of decades ago, but his character is a caricature.) By the time “Operation Fortune” wobbles to an epilogue we’ve seen coming for a long time, it feels like the ruse is on us.
