Jason Statham is currently back in theaters with A Working Man, reteaming with director David Ayer on the heels of their action hit The Beekeeper. In fact, The Beekeeper unexpectedly became Statham’s biggest movie ever as a solo action star – that is, a movie where he’s not costarring with another major star, like Melissa McCarthy or Sylvester Stallone, or a massive visual-effects beast, like a giant shark or Vin Diesel. Beekeeper was especially good for Statham’s career because less than a year earlier, he had one of his biggest U.S. flops ever: Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, a Guy Ritchie-directed spy caper. (In North America, it barely pulled in more than Ritchie and Statham’s debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, made a quarter-century earlier in a much more limited release, on a much more limited budget.) It’s too bad, because audiences missed out on one of Statham’s best recent films. Now that the film is streaming for free on the Roku Channel (or on Starz, for subscribers), fans can correct this grievous error.
Why Watch Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre tonight?
Jason Statham is a reliable action star, cranking (and Cranking) out programmers on the regular. This usually places him either soloing through fights and shoot-outs where he’s the star attraction, or in the midst of high-powered co-stars and visual effects in his more blockbuster-scale movies. Operation Fortune is lighter on both the fight scenes and effects fireworks, giving him sort of a poor bloke’s version of Mission: Impossible, as a companion to his poor bloke’s version of James Bond in the Transporter series. Not that poor, though, because Statham’s super-spy Orson Fortune blithely spends government money, in part to taunt the officious handler (Cary Elwes) who hires him to retrieve a value and dangerous McGuffin-type device. It’s fallen into the hands of a schmoozy arms dealer (Hugh Grant), who plans to sell it for billions to bad guys who will use it to cause global financial destruction, blah blah blah.
As in a later-period Mission: Impossible movie, much of the fun is the makeshift team that surrounds the unflappable hero. Here the team includes the invaluable Aubrey Plaza, as a brash American hacker; Josh Hartnett, playing a doofus-y Hollywood actor roped into the proceedings because the arms dealer admires him (and/or wants to steal whatever girlfriend he has on hand, in this case an undercover Plaza); and Bugzy Malone as a jack-of-all-trades professional.
Everyone in the movie is pretty delightful, but Plaza – one of our great offbeat movie stars – is especially fun, giving every line her personal spin and bouncing her chaotic energy off of Statham’s lightly-worn glowering. Ritchie isn’t going full-on music-video with his style here, but he’s clearly, ah, invigorated by the opportunity to photograph Plaza swooping through the frame in a gorgeous red dress or talking Statham through a mission with her lips to the mic like a sultry DJ. The movie in a nutshell is best conveyed by a sequence where Ritchie cross-cuts between Statham bantering his way through a punch-up (there are fewer fights, but obviously not none) and Plaza BSing her way through an art discussion as she works undercover. It’s constantly juggling the fun of maintaining and breaking cover.
Ritchie also deserves credit for getting in on the Josh Hartnett comeback trail early; he put him in Wrath of Man, also with Statham, and then brought him back for this comic showcase, where he takes a potential stock part (the dopey actor in over his head) and makes him sweetly funny as he navigates the nerve-wracking job of playing himself. Grant, well into his late-period scene-stealing phase, makes a great secondary villain, a guy who’s more of an amoral prick than a truly evil man. The joy of performance throughout the movie boosts Statham’s style all the more; he’s not doing anything wildly different from his other movies, but he seems more mischievously amused to be doing it.
As Statham gets older, even if he continues to keep himself in pristine shape, he probably won’t be able to maintain the dexterity and flexibility of his best action pictures. Operation Fortune is proof positive that there’s plenty of other fun genre work he can do without sinking into vengeful old-man grimness. Even in this franchise-drunk world, there’s virtually no chance of any further Fortune operations, but that’s a shame. I’d watch two or three more of these in a heartbeat, and I think you would too.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
The post What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘Operation Fortune,’ an Underseen Jason Statham Action-Adventure appeared first on Decider.
