There is that feeling when you are working on a puzzle. You see the spot you need to fill and you look at the scattered puzzle pieces looking for a home. Your brain figures out the shape and colour and you know that this piece will effortlessly fit in this hole.
You get a dopamine release because you are excited to be proven brilliant, funny, and intelligent by your unimpeachable power of observation. You press the piece down, expecting crowds of people to applaud your talent, but it doesn’t quite fit. You push and press and the puzzle piece laughs at your feeble effort. The world is a little less bright and a little more grey.
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (dir. Guy Ritchie) follows elite spy Orson Fortune (Jason Statham) on an adventure to save the world. A new deadly weapon of unknown devastation has been stolen and arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant) is brokering a deal to get into some nefarious hands.
Fortune assembles his team consisting of a new recruit Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza), and J.J (Bugzy Malone) and their cunning plan involves recruiting famous actor Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett) to be a distraction because of Simmonds’s love for Francesco’s films.
Guy Ritchie’s recent movie The Gentlemen was an awesome return to form, going back to his criminal underworld roots of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. This film felt like it wanted to be that in terms of dialogue and swagger but like that puzzle piece things never fell into place.
Hugh Grant is a scene stealer, similar to his role in The Gentlemen, he is smarmy, vulgar and outrageous. However, he sometimes feels like he is in a different movie. The film tries to be an action film, a spy film, camp, ostentatious, witty, a comedy, serious, funny and never really hits the marks with any of them.
I think Ritchie has gotten great work out of Statham in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch but he often felt like he was in a different movie, nearly a cliche or satire of the action star he now is in films like Hobbs and Shaw and The Meg. There never felt like there were any stakes or fear of harm to any of the main characters.
The casting of Hartnett was interesting and meta. A man who turned down huge roles is playing a super famous actor having to act in front of Francesco as himself, not knowing who he is since he always acts. The interplay between Francesco, Fidel, Fortune and their mark Simmonds was fun and showed off Ritchie’s skill with banter and wit.
It was a fun movie with good performances, fun set pieces, and lots of interesting and fun locations (must be nice to write a film where you go to beautiful parts of the world on someone else’s dime, a good gig if you can get it.) but I was hoping more from a Ritchie production. He has given us some classics and I have high expectations.
I wouldn’t suggest running out to the cinema to watch it but like a puzzle to kill some time on a lazy Sunday it could be a fun watching on streaming.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe