I travel by air every couple of months, and always think about a single, burning question: What makes for a great airplane movie? Not movies about being on planes. Movies to be watched on planes, making bearable the three or nine hours spent in a tin can, squashed on all sides, munching tiny pretzels and trying not to order yet another gin and tonic.
“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” the latest offering from the director Guy Ritchie, is a perfect airplane movie. That is not a compliment, but it’s not exactly a dis. Some movies shouldn’t be watched on planes — slow artful dramas, or movies that demand concentration and good sound (please do not watch “The Zone of Interest” on your next flight). But you’ve got to watch something, and for that, we have movies like this one.
Ritchie didn’t always make airplane movies. His early work, frenetic and ribald and hilarious movies like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch,” begged to be watched in a room full of roaring audience members, or at least at home over pizza and beers with your friends. In more recent films like “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” he’s veered darker and more serious, the sort of thing that might make a flight even more tense.
But watching “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” which applies a frivolous touch to a serious matter (that is, defeating Nazis), I realized it embodied my three most important principles for airplane movies.
Principle I: Make It Familiar
“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a fictionalized account of a real thing that was only recently discovered. During World War II, in an effort to cripple German U-boats in the North Atlantic and also open the way for the Americans to join the war, Winston Churchill maybe-sorta-unofficially authorized a rogue band of daredevils to execute a delicate operation: Cut off resources to the Germans by sinking their supply ships. Unfortunately the refueling operations, accomplished via a few Italian boats, were parked on a Spanish-controlled island called Fernando Po, located just off the coast of West Africa — in neutral territory. An official British campaign would cause the rest of unaligned Europe to join up with the Nazis. So it had to be done in secret.
This actually happened, and it all came out when Churchill’s personal files were declassified in 2016. So in a sense, it’s a new story.
But it’s also a very old-feeling one, probably because there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a movie about how the bad guys got beat in World War II. It’s comforting. You know who to root for basically from the moment the movie starts. You can do all kinds of things that wouldn’t fly otherwise, like make sure all of the villains (that is, the Nazis) are slow and stupid and quickly mowed down by the rogue toughies with the guns, and the good guys are handsome and quippy and adept. Character development? Never met her.
The familiarity has an added bonus: “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” rips through its story in two hours flat, which increases the chances you’ll actually get to see the ending before the plane lands. But if you don’t, no worries. You basically know what happens.
Principle II: Make It Repetitive
This also is a principle in the list of what makes a good streaming movie. It’s hard to avoid distractions: dogs, doorbells, kitchen snacks, Instagram. Plane distractions are different: disruptive neighbors, captains’ rhapsodies regarding altitude, drink carts, general loudness. An obvious and repetitive screenplay is necessary, one that follows the time-honored principles honed by teachers and preachers: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.
This happens a great deal in “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” which was adapted by four screenwriters from the nonfiction book “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops” by Damien Lewis. The band of rogues are led by Gus March-Phillipps (mustachioed Henry Cavill), who is good with a gun and refuses to take orders. He brings together the munitions expert Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding), the ship’s captain Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), the strategist Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) and the comically ripped Dane Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson); the actress Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and Fernando Po’s premiere club owner Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) are part of the crew too.
Early in the movie, British intelligence leaders — Churchill (Rory Kinnear), Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes) and Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox), the future creator of James Bond — discuss the mission and their need to cut off supply lines to the U-boats. Then they call in March-Phillipps and explain the mission to him. Then he explains the mission to his team, and if I wasn’t counting wrong it’s explained at least once more.
By the last act of the movie (by which said plan, unsurprisingly, has had to shift a little), March-Phillipps is reduced to mostly standing around narrating whether or not the plan is going well. “That wasn’t supposed to happen yet,” he says, when something wasn’t supposed to happen yet.
Great gobs of expository dialogue are exasperating if you’re paying attention. But if you missed what that group of guys were talking about because the snack tray came by, don’t worry: they’ll say it again later.
Principle III: Lower the Stakes
Yes, it actually mattered immensely who won World War II, for reasons I hope we all understand. But “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” goes very light on those conversations. Characters’ hatred of the Nazis is linked to the murders of family members, including one character with a Jewish family. But the longest and most detailed conversation about the stakes suggests that if the Germans won the war, everyone would have to eat sausages, cabbage and brown bread forever, and nobody would want that.
We do know it’s a bigger deal. But “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” lowers the stakes on World War II specifically to make it more lighthearted, which has the result of making it far less interesting. Lewis’s source book, as its subtitle suggests, explores how this group’s efforts actually led to a new kind of warfare that has dominated conflicts in the 21st century, but you’d never know it from the movie. And I wonder sometimes how turning this particular war, the killing and the death, into lighthearted comedy, affects what we think of it. After all, almost everyone alive experiences this war through screens now. It’s a strange thing we’ve done.
In any case, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is not a good movie nor a terribly enjoyable one, if you’re paying attention to it. But as background noise, it’s diverting and intermittently amusing. And I can almost guarantee it’s coming to an airplane near you, soon enough.
The post ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ Review: War, Undemanding appeared first on New York Times.