re: First trailer for Guy Ritchie‘s “The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare”

Just got out of an early screening…..this was not good unfortunately and I wanted to like it.

There’s some fun stuff action wise and performances by Alan Richardson and Cavill keep the movie fun/light enough that it wasn’t the worst time, but they put little effort in anything else.

Lot of issues with it, mainly there are never any real stakes. Never seen a movie make their protagonists as untouchable as this one. Felt like they were trying to do like 3 movies at once and couldn’t decide which. The only tension driven in the movie is from an overanxious score that tries to tell you the stakes are high but in reality it’s just another walk in the park

Nothing plot or character wise is ever close to be earned. The term “show and don’t tell” was never thought of when writing the script. Something needs to happen? Well it just happened because a character just said it happened. Need an emotional beat? Well now we’ve decided these characters are real close from their previous 2 lines. Everything from exposition to setting up the next scene is just bluntly said to the audience

Felt like the first draft of a script that Richie wrote doing lines while reading Ian Fleming novels with Inglorious Basterds playing in the background. There’s so much inglorious basterds homage/ satire/references that it just feels confusing.

Also Winston Churchill is arguably the lead character in this movie the way they ended up doing it. Half the movie is a WW2 movie and the other half is setting up a sort of heist/team up movie and both plots do a disservice to each other and really undercut the purpose of each