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operation-fortune-review-header.png

'Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre' Makes a Case For Banning Hugh Grant From Doing a 'Cockney' Accent

By Petr Navovy | Film | March 13, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | March 13, 2023 |


operation-fortune-review-header.png

I don’t know Guy Ritchie personally. I’ve never met him, talked to him, never shared the same space as him. Yet despite all that, I’m overwhelmingly certain that he is insufferable to be around. That may be unfair, but that is the impression that his work gives me. Whether better (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) or worse (most of the others), all of Ritchie’s films ooze a smugness and a shallow, sophomoric sort of misanthropy that makes me involuntarily plan my hypothetical exit routes for the highly unlikely scenario that I ever get caught in a pub conversation with him.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, the English writer-director’s latest, finds the filmmaker operating in the mode that brought us The Man From U.N.C.L.E.—one of his best efforts—in that it follows a globe-hopping spy getting up to some hijinx while attempting to thwart a villainous plot, the labyrinthine details of which are neither important nor particularly interesting. Except where the 2015 film was relatively charming, well-paced, and featured enough decent set pieces to keep the blood pulsing through your veins, Operation Fortune (I’m not typing out the full thing each time) stalls after a relatively promising opening and never recovers. By the end, I was completely disengaged from what was happening on screen.

Rather than a suave yet bruising Henry Cavill channeling a variation on James Bond, here our lead is Jason Statham, doing… Well, Jason Statham. Does he ever do anything else? There are flavors to a Statham performance—sometimes they are quite straight ahead (The Transporter), other times they are part-sincere and part-self-reflexive parody (Crank)—but regardless of the tone, fundamentally, Jason Statham does one thing. He does it well, and it’s a lovely thing to behold when it’s deployed tactically, but here, as alcoholic superspy Orson Fortune, he struggles to hold the weight of this (inexcusably) 1-hour-and-54-minutes-long uneven romp on his broad shoulders.

It’s almost like the filmmakers knew that it would be a lot to ask of Statham, so they surrounded him with what, on paper, looks like a more than capable crew of co-adventurers. There’s the ever-reliable Aubrey Plaza as obligatory tech-whizz Sarah Fidel—the kind that uses their omnipotent IT powers to oversee things, give instructions into earpieces, and ‘hack’ into everything from security cameras to vending machines—who also, conveniently, looks like Aubrey Plaza, so she can be deployed in the field in a red dress to hack into bad guys’ brains. There’s Josh Hartnett (Lucky Number Slevin hive, rise up!), playing spoiled action movie star Danny Francesco who gets roped into the spy game against his will. Cary Elwes swans about cloaked in a waistcoat and posh accent as Fortune’s smug sort-of-handler Nathan Jasmine, and English rapper-turned-actor Bugzy Malone (The Gentlemen) plays J.J. Davies—another member of the crew who gets some good dry deliveries in, but who the film mostly relegates to walking at the back of any group shot and to responding to Statham’s orders. Finally, there’s Hugh Grant, as billionaire arms dealer and certified annoying d*khead, Greg Simmonds (a role which must have come quite naturally to Grant).

Aside from posho Hugh Grant doing a ‘cockney’ accent making me want to scrape fingernails against a chalkboard, most of the cast is game, and they try their best. It’s a shame, then, that they don’t have much to work with at all. There are some parts in Operation Fortune that work, that pop. The opening sequence features a fun bit of sound design, mixing heels walking on marble with gunshots and the musical score, and there are half-decent moments of banter and tension peppered throughout the film. These are overwhelmed, however, by frequent instances of limp and unfunny—occasionally cringeworthy—dialogue and competent yet uninspired action sequences.

The opening ten minutes or so of Operation Fortune feel like the setup to a Hitman game, which I mean as a compliment! That series—one of my favorites—has you playing as a master assassin, who gets prepped before each self-contained mission as to the identities of your targets, and of any secondary goals that might need accomplishing. It’s a good template for a popcorn movie, and Ritchie wastes no time in outlining things for the characters as well as the audience: ‘You need to find this person, and do this! This is why only you can do it, and here’s why there is time pressure! This is who you should assemble for your team and why.’ That propulsive, exposition-heavy dump needs to be followed by a well-structured story, however. That’s not what happens. What we get instead is a bland and often confusing—despite a significant proportion of the dialogue being a constant explanation of what’s going on (‘Just remember, he’s just a bag man, he’s no threat, we just need to know what he’s carrying,’ etc., etc.)—meander through some picturesque global locations (that aren’t shot with any particular verve or style), shot through with often insufferable, ‘rapid fire’ Ritchie-isms like:

‘Imminently!’
‘How imminently?’
‘Imminently imminently.’

Urgh.

Put it this way: It’s not great when the biggest laugh a comedy gets is a derisory one in response to its explicit attempt to set up a sequel in its final minute.