The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Jolly good show!

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless violent content and some profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.19.24

This one has it all:

 

Taut suspense; superb direction and pacing; well-crafted characters played by a terrific cast; dry, mordant humor; and a jaw-dropping, war-era assignment that unfolds like Mission: Impossible without the gadgets, and is based on actual events related within Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s declassified memoirs, as detailed in Damien Lewis’ 2014 nonfiction book, Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII.

 

Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill, center) believes that he and his lads — clockwise from
left, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), Henry Hayes
(Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding) — can seriously compromise
Nazi U-boat activities.

To be sure, director Guy Ritchie and his co-writers — Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson and Arash Amel — have, um enhanced these events quite a bit; that’s to be expected from the flamboyant filmmaker who brought us (among many others) Snatch, The Gentlemen and cheeky updates of Sherlock Holmes and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

But enough truth remains to make this one of the most audacious covert operations ever to emerge from World War II.

 

England is in dire straits as this story begins, with London enduring nightly Nazi bombing raids, and American forces unable to cross the Atlantic due to the persistent threat of German U-boats (that latter detail stretching the truth a bit). Determined to break this impasse, Churchill (Rory Kinnear) authorizes an off-books assault — dubbed Operation Postmaster —  proposed by Special Operations Executive Brigadier Colin Gubbins (Cary Elwes) and his personal assistant, Lt. Commander Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox).

 

(Yes, that Ian Fleming. He had quite the colorful career during the war.)

 

The details are to remain a secret between Churchill, Gubbins and Fleming: withheld, in particular, from War Office senior officers who favor trying to cut a deal with Hitler (!).

 

The plan: a clandestine black-ops mission — in other words, “ungentlemanly,” by the norms at that time — involving a small group of carefully selected mercenaries, tasked with destroying a crucial U-boat supply ship berthed in a neutral Spanish port on the volcanic island of Fernando Po.

 

Gubbins’ choice to head the mission: Major Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), currently a guest of Her Majesty’s prison system.

 

(Well, naturally.)

 

What follows is a thrilling blend of The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven and, yes, the aforementioned Mission: Impossible. Once released and apprised of the assignment — when he isn’t cadging fine spirits, cigars and Fleming’s lighter (a cute bit) — March-Phillips assembles his team, each of whom would walk through fire on his behalf:

 

• Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), an Irish navigations expert;

 

• Freddy “The Frogman” Alvarez (Henry Golding), a demolitions pro fully at home underwater; and

 

• Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson, recognized from Amazon Prime’s “Reacher” TV series), an unstoppable killing machine, equally adept with knives and his beloved long-range bow and arrows, who has a charming habit of collecting the hearts of his Nazi victims.

 

Elvis & Nixon: Double Trouble

Elvis & Nixon (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang

Kevin Spacey’s marvelous impersonation of Richard Nixon, by itself, is worth the price of admission.

That said, everything about director Liza Johnson’s cheeky little comedy is thoroughly delightful.

To their mutual surprise, Elvis Presley (Michael Shannon, left) and President Richard M.
Nixon (Kevin Spacey) discover that they have a lot in common ... including a fondness for
Dr. Pepper.

It’s also based on an actual incident that deserves prominent placement in the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction file: an event that scripters Joel Sagal, Hanala Sagal and Cary Elwes have built into a droll ensemble piece that also would work as an amusing stage play, particularly if staffed as well as Johnson and casting directors Kerry Barden and Paul Schnee have done here.

Johnson’s film expands upon the unlikely White House encounter between Elvis Presley and President Nixon, which took place shortly after noon on Dec. 21, 1970. Presley orchestrated the meeting, mostly because he wanted to augment his collection of official police badges with one from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Nixon, in turn, was encouraged to approve this unexpected guest as a means of enhancing his “one of the people” cred, and for the killer photo op. The latter scheme backfired somewhat, when Presley requested that the meeting be kept secret ... which it was, but only for about a year, at which point columnist Jack Anderson published what he had learned.

Which, as it happens, wasn’t as much as one might think. Elvis’ visit took place before Nixon had the Oval Office wired for continuous taping, and our only record of their actual conversation is based on notes taken by Nixon aide Egil “Bud” Krogh.

Which conveniently gives this film’s scripters plenty of room for, ah, embellishment. And they’ve done this with deliciously understated subtlety, matched by Johnson’s equally delicate touch with her cast.

The story begins a few days earlier, as a bored Presley (Michael Shannon), dismayed by the images of civil unrest emanating from the multiple TV sets in his Graceland lounge, impulsively decides that he can do something about this. He flies to Los Angeles to collect longtime friend and handler Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), who has left Presley’s employ in an effort to carve out his own career.

This is the first of the film’s strong character dynamics. Presley clearly misses Schilling, in great part because Jerry is one of the few people who likes Elvis for what he is, rather than the superficial wealth and celebrity. Despite that, Presley clumsily tries to “buy” Schilling’s return with offers of expensive gifts: a wistfully ironic touch that Shannon delivers with an endearing, gruff awkwardness.

Magic Mike: No rabbit in this hat

Magic Mike (2012) • View trailer
Two stars. Rating: R, for pervasive sexual content, profanity, drug use and fleeting graphic nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.29.12

For perhaps 15 minutes, Channing Tatum’s title character seems an honorable fellow, deserving sympathy and worthy of our hope that he might escape the unusual lifestyle into which he had trapped himself.

Despite his best efforts, Mike (Channing Tatum) can't get Brooke (Cody
Horn) to take him seriously: no surprise, really, since his "best efforts"
at sincerity inevitably ring hollow. Which begs the crucial question:
Would it actually be a good thing if this independent young woman
were to fall in love with this jerk?

But that, it soon became clear, was giving far too much credit to Reid Carolin’s vacuous, soulless and utterly pointless screenplay. Magic Mike is worse than disappointing; it’s boring. It can’t even succeed as a titillating guilty pleasure, and that’s a harsh indictment for a project so consumed with the world of male strippers.

We’re never made to care about any of these guys, let alone the few women who revolve around their self-absorbed orbits. Nobody deserves redemption, and not even Tatum’s Mike deserves happiness; he does nothing to earn it. Carolin’s core plot is as old as Hollywood’s hedonistic hills — dewy-eyed innocent gets seduced and quickly overwhelmed by the sybaritic delights of his new occupation — and this slog of a film does nothing to freshen up the material, or make it interesting in any manner.

All of which is quite a surprise, considering that the man at the helm is Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh. What a waste of time and talent.

We must remember, though, that Soderbergh comes in several different flavors. He’s the consummate observer of human nature who brought us exceptional dramas such as King of the Hill, Erin Brockovich and Traffic; he’s also the crowd-pleasing entertainer who delighted us with star-studded confections such as Ocean’s Eleven, Out of Sight and The Good German.

For the purposes of this discussion, however, Soderbergh is the kink-obsessed voyeur and stylistic renegade who began his big-screen career with 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, and then tortured us 13 years later with the jaw-droppingly inept and deadly dull Full Frontal, truly one of the worst films ever made by an A-list director.

That's the guy who made Magic Mike.

This film’s most irritating stylistic tic surfaces quickly, with Soderbergh’s reliance on a seemingly spontaneous approach to dialogue delivery. All his actors fumble and stumble through their lines, obviously deliberately, as if to suggest verisimilitude by mimicking the way ordinary people talk to each other in real life. Our speech often is punctuated by pauses and struggles for the right words, as opposed to the sparkling, perfectly timed bon mots traditionally delivered in movies.

OK, fair point. But it simply doesn’t work here; too often these actors — most particularly Tatum — look and sound as if they can’t remember their lines. Or, worse yet, like they’re improvising dialogue on the spot, and doing a truly terrible job of it.

There’s a world of difference between naturalistic and incompetent, and Magic Mike too frequently feels like the latter.