Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is something like a parody of the Mission: Impossible franchise that’s only half-aware that it’s a parody. At least, though, this convoluted but utterly vapid espionage caper gives one a good idea of what to expect via its impenetrable title. In fact, only the bland gentlemen spies at its center might appreciate the extent to which the plot itself is a prolonged misdirect toward a dead end, as this is a film that suggests an elaborate mask shrouding an absolutely nondescript entity.
It’s true enough that the enjoyment to be found in Ritchie’s films have often come from his stylistic flair, through which he’s demonstrated that a clever linearity-breaking cut can generate almost as much propulsive energy as a truly involving story. But there’s no such propulsion in the occasional showy formal twist that he and his collaborators inject into Operation Fortune’s rote run-through of stock spy-film scenarios. Each crosscut, smash cut, and abrupt flashback is as hollow a gesture as Jason Statham’s unchanging tough-guy grimace, as squandered as Aubrey Plaza’s trademark “cringe” persona, and as irrelevant as the film’s anonymous action sequences.
Statham plays private contractor Orson Fortune, who’s called upon by debonair and cynical British agent Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes) to track down a briefcase stolen at a facility in Odessa. What’s in the briefcase is unclear. Nor do the British know who stole it, or who will be buying it. But from an early chase scene and some equally rushed exposition, facilitated by Fortune’s fellow mercenary spy J.J. Davies (Bugzy Malone) and the keyboard-clacking of Plaza’s tech expert Sara Fidel, we at least know that the middle-man is billionaire arms dealer George Simonds (Hugh Grant, delivering a half-hearted imitation of a Michael Caine gangster).
So the team heads off to infiltrate Simonds’s yacht party in the French Riviera, picking up movie star Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett) along the way, because Simonds has a weakness for celebrity. Keeping the MacGuffin unspecified for a good portion of a film’s runtime might work in one that can build suspense through thoughtfully structured action, but in Operation Fortune, it just empties sequences like the seemingly interminable one on the yacht of any interest. With no clear stakes and no tension to be heightened or playfully diffused, this sequence’s attempts at action and humor are pure duds: Fortune walks into a hand-to-hand fight mostly, it seems, because the film needs that beat at that moment, and Fidel flirts with nefarious masterminds because that’s what female characters do in these sorts of movies.
Meanwhile, a rivalry between Fortune and his rival contractor, called only Mike (Peter Ferdinando), seems meant to substitute for us knowing what the heck everyone is fighting over. On the yacht and at each of the arbitrary but always warm and exotic locations where Fortune’s team run a mission, they encounter Mike’s operatives, also attempting to seize the contact, the account numbers, the briefcase, or whatever form the objective has taken.
Lest one is tempted to ascribe to Operation Fortune aspirations to satirize the rivals’ pointless macho posturing, the film makes abundantly clear that Fortune is the apex of masculine competency. For one, its lifeless combat scenes never even toy with the idea that his combatants stand a chance, unconvincingly but earnestly situating Fortune as a flawless, Jack Reacher-style executor of retribution. And the film’s unwillingness to undercut this overfamiliar posture only accentuates its lack of any real take on the genre flicks that it’s aping.
As for Fidel and Francesco, they may have even less going on than Fortune. Across the film’s runtime, Fidel is variously seen as an acerbic wit, an awkward techie, a smooth professional, and a sexy object, with no sense that these characteristics cohere into a personality that might help the comic relief go over. Hartnett is well-cast as the narcissistic, oblivious movie star, but the character proves largely extraneous—despite, unlike Fidel or Fortune, having something of an arc, inasmuch as he comes to be seduced by Simonds’s largesse and personality.
Throughout, sequences are so haphazardly strung together that they might as well run in the reverse order, from one in which Fortune infiltrates the crudely stereotypical Ukrainian gang’s complex to one in which Francesco and Fidel pose as boyfriend and girlfriend at Simonds’s palatial home. The film evinces Ritchie’s willingness to play around with story structure, but this fails to spruce up a simplistic plot that confuses vagueness for cleverness. The narrative ellipses don’t lay the groundwork for anything clever, and despite their arch musing, the characters are never funny. Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.
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A spot-on review Pat. Despite the very low expectations I had for this film (chosen because it offered low-effort relief on a mercilessly hot day), the film did not even satisfy these.
Statham mails in his performance, and Hugh Grant (who I noticed for the first time is actually rather diminutive) is just annoying. To top it off, the volume was turned up to uncomfortable, grimace-causing levels in the cinema in which I saw it. I left early, without regrets.