Guy Richie’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Practices Uncharacteristic Restraint
Guy Ritchie has become such a prolific and well-known director that it’s easy to forget that his first few films were released in the aftermath of the Quentin Tarantino explosion of the mid-1990s. In part, this is because Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch don’t actually resemble Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction as closely as any number of more shameless rip-offs from that era, and by the time Ritchie was on the scene, Tarantino himself had moved into the more adult key of Jackie Brown, then the more gleefully rococo Kill Bill, largely abdicating the ensemble-criminal beat. Yet Ritchie’s early comic-gangster films still do feel connected to Tarantino, maybe because they concentrate the attitudes of a few key motifs or scenes – comic violence, irreverent dialogue – into firecracker cartoon versions. They’re almost like watching someone make a Tarantino pastiche based on the excited descriptions of 13-year-olds who snuck only illicit, incomplete peeks in between their Oasis listening parties. It’s surprising, then, the way that Ritchie circles back to knock off Tarantino more directly in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
It’s not surprising that Ritchie would do it – it’s actually a little stranger that later-period Tarantino hasn’t inspired more imitators – but that he makes such a relatively stolid, dad-friendly attempt. At the time of its release, some viewers were puzzled by the degree to which Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds elided its titular band of Nazi-hunting commandos, bringing a few of them to the fore alongside their leader (played by Brad Pitt) but largely focusing on characters who intersect with the Basterds on their missions. Having Guy Ritchie direct a less ambitious version seems like the perfect opportunity to make a movie that’s more directly interested in a bunch of lads with easily identifiable characteristics, perhaps even colorful nicknames, scrapping and killing their way through World War II. This is a man whose mostly stoic, Los Angeles-set heist movie Wrath of Man still includes a bloke named Boy Sweat Dave; surely he could attempt to out-QT in assembling a bunch of disreputable, mostly British soldiers for a proto-black-ops mission to sink a German U-boat. There’s certainly some of that laddish irreverence on hand when the crew must embark on a pre-mission to retrieve Apple (Alex Pettyfer) from German hands.
Yet The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is surprisingly faithful to the sensibility of Basterds (if far less fanciful). Charismatic leader Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) commands a ragtag-but-not-that-ragtag crew who show no mercy in blasting away their Nazi enemies; most of them aren’t Jewish, but they have similar vendettas against their German oppressors. Instead of scalps, Anderes Lassen (a perpetually blood-spattered Alan Ritchson) purports to collect Nazi hearts, though we only see him extract one. There’s even a side story involving the actress-turned-spy Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) going undercover, which also features Basterds player Til Schweiger (though he’s playing a faithful German soldier this time, not one who’s swapped sides).
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