Those preparing for a wagon load of Guy Ritchie tropes, rest easy. For although the director’s latest film features plenty of posh men doing suave things with cut-glass accents, this neatly dodges many Ritchie-isms in favour of a very slick war film.
Earlier this year, we had Ritchie’s TV series The Gentlemen – a Netflix caper that saw Theo James as the heroic titular gent being posh, getting involved in scrapes and having a jolly good punch up every now and again. This time around, it’s Henry Cavill’s turn, and while the suaveness is indeed dialled up to 100, there still feels like there’s something lacking here.
The premise is good, and even better, it’s based (I use the word based very loosely here) on a true story. The year is 1942. The Nazi war machine is in full swing and its fleet of S-boats are stopping American troops and supplies from making it across the Atlantic.
Churchill (an unrecogniseable Rory Kinnear) is desperate, and so he recruits a bunch of scallywags to set out on a top-secret mission: scupper the boats that supply and repair the submarines, thereby crippling them.
Is this really how the top secret espionage operation Special Operations Executive – created by Churchill’s to go behind enemy lines and “set Europe ablaze”, worked? Unlikely but suspension of disbelief is key here.
Cavill’s Gus March-Phillipps starts the film in prison and proceeds to do a lot of heinous things in the name of fighting for Britain. Cavill plays him with the stiffest of upper lips (the spectre of the words “old chap” hover at the end of every sentence), but doesn’t quite manage to convey the same eye-twinkling charisma as his Ritchie forebears.
He’s also joined by a crack squad of flimsily-drawn characters – basically there to shoot Nazis and look good while doing it. There’s Alan Ritchson (the impossibly muscly action man who plays the title character in Amazon Prime’s Reacher) playing an angry Dane who likes to stab Nazis as well as shoot them with a bow and arrow. There’s also Alex Pettyfer, who says almost nothing but damn, look at that smoulder.
The closest thing to a character arc we have is in Eiza González’s Marjorie Stewart, an actress of Jewish descent whose family were killed by the Nazis, and it’s her job is to seduce a senior German officer (Til Schweiger). These prove the most nail-bitingly tense scenes in the film, even if she is providing a distraction so the boys can go about their work.
Just as well their work is so damn entertaining. “You were not chosen for your conspicuous morals or high ideals. You were chosen because you are the last resort,” Churchill tells them. “Ruthless men who will not hesitate to stoop beneath the conventions of war.”
You can say that again. It’s hard to keep up as the body count spirals past the hundred mark, but Cavill and co proceed to cut a bloody swathe through the Third Reich, taking down prison camps and killing entire garrisons with such efficiency you suddenly wonder why they didn’t manage to break out of Stalag Luft III sooner.
It’s here where Ritchie excels, which is good, because the film is 70 per cent action sequence. Stylishly shot and jauntily executed, murdering with impunity has never looked so fun – or effortless.
And of course, all the main characters are protected by two-inch thick plot armour. If you’re looking for a mindlessly fun watch in which good triumphs over bad, this is it, even if it does swap the gritty realism of real-life events for a Boy’s Own adventure.
But for all those seeking something with a bit more depth, the next series of SAS Rogue Heroes is waiting just around the corner.
