The heroes of British intelligence embark on a fraught mission of exposition in John Madden’s garrulous account of a hush-hush, top-secret allied plot to beat Hitler. They’re outlining the idea inside smoke-filled admiralty offices, road-testing the scheme in crowded dance halls and pubs, noisily chewing over the difficulties of planting false papers on a corpse. The secretaries are talking to the agents, the agents to the admiral, the admiral to Winston Churchill while strolling in the garden at No 10. The only fellow not talking, thank goodness, is the corpse.
Adapted from the bestselling book by Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat crashlands in cinemas as a stolid, Blimpish wartime thriller, adorned with epaulettes and brass buttons, eyeglasses and moustaches. Colin Firth plays stiff-backed Ewen Montagu, the MI5 agent who hatches a scheme to divert Nazi forces from the shores of Sicily and thereby lay the ground for a full-scale invasion of the continent. Montagu requires a dead body as decoy, a wily co-conspirator (Matthew Macfadyen) and an office romance (Kelly Macdonald), though possibly not in that order. But the clock is ticking and the subterfuge is contagious. The longer the agents spend concocting their cover story, the more real it becomes until nobody is sure who’s in love with which person, and who’s a spy and who’s not.
A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue. The young Ian Fleming, we’re told, was one of the agents who helped devise Operation Mincemeat. At intervals, Madden’s camera catches him lounging in the corner, tapping away at his typewriter; a semi-detached player in this particular plot, already dreaming of bigger, better things.
