2023 Guy Ritchie Double Feature

Out from the barren cinematic landscape comes Guy Ritchie

Thus far, the cinema of 2023 has inspired very little excitement in me. Beyond John Wick: Chapter 4, which I loved, & the great Neil Jordan’s Marlowe. The cinematic landscape has been pretty boring ever since the pandemic. Especially in America.

The highest grossing movie of 2023 so far has been The Super Mario Bros. Movie, & since I don’t have any kids old enough to take to the theater, it is definitely not on my list. I lost all my interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe after the big-screen television-series episode #17, Avengers: Infinity War, so the new Ant-Man & Guardians of the Galaxy movies fell flat for me, as they seem to have done for the pop culture at large. The first lost money, the second looks to be profitable; neither is impressive. I likewise yawned at Creed III (the Rocky series now fully Rocky-free), Scream VI (the joke was played out by Scream II), M3GAN (yet another throwaway “little kid is scary” + AI horror flick), Dungeons & Dragons (which Titus panned for abandoning its fanbase of boys & young men), Fast X (more superheroes), Evil Dead Rise (Evil Dead redone, minus most of its fun). So on & so forth, not much fun.

That being said, one of my favorite working directors, the fantastic Guy Ritchie, has two new movies out this year! Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, which released in America on March 3^rd, & The Covenant, which released on April 21^st. These were automatically must-see for me.

Guy Ritchie is among the better contemporary filmmakers. His movies are kinetic. They’re fun, stylish, exciting, sexy, erotic, & human. Things which can be said for too few directors these days. Ritchie’s heist movies & crime flicks rise above the crowd by making his characters admirable. The entire plot is about impressive men & friendship between men, which is rare in our times. Snatch is the most famous example, but the recent The Gentlemen is quite similar. We know what the heist means to each & every character, & though the characters are often shown as being trapped in their lives of crime, they don’t play victim to that. These are metaphors, saturated by the pop culture of the ‘60s & 70s, for men seeking freedom from the incredibly constraining society of our times. Contrast Ritchie’s stories with the heist & crime movies of Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Logan Lucky, & No Sudden Move), which, though often skillfully made, are filled with cruel or contemptuous caricatures one can barely call human.

Most of Ritchie’s movies are extremely English as well. He famously repeats the ‘60s interest in Cockney accents & the cunning of the lower classes. He even brought these tropes to his enjoyable King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. It’s a Brexit movie! Ritchie’s King Arthur is intensely laddish & populist. His Arthur is a people’s King, & Charlie Hunnam is macho, swaggering, & democratic in the role.

Ritchie’s two new movies are both interesting in at least a few ways. Both films feature scripts by Ritchie & his two recent collaborators, Ivan Atkinson & Marn Davies.

First, there’s the long-delayed Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. An action-comedy spy flick. The plot is fairly simple, something you might have seen on cable twenty years ago. Ukrainian mobsters steal “The Handle,” worth billions, apparently, from the UK. So the British gov’t contracts Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes) to assemble a team & get “The Handle” back before the world’s most successful arms dealer, Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), can get his beautiful, slimy hands on it. Jasmine assembles a team made up of a super-spy in decline, Orson Fortune (Jason Statham); a sassy tech-savvy newcomer, Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza); & the quiet, Stoic J.J. Davies (Bugzy Malone). Once they discover they’re being pitted against other contracted teams, though, our plucky entrepreneurs of espionage find their own secret weapon by blackmailing Hollywood star Danny Francesco, with whom arms dealer Simmonds is infatuated, to help them get close to the arms dealer. Hijinks ensue.

Operation Fortune is not quite a good movie. It doesn’t have enough twists & turns, the plotting & pacing are very variable. The tone swings from improvised comic moments to deadly seriousness, from fluff to military executions. The dialogue is witty at times, but often dull or awkward. The action scenes play well, but there’s not a lot to them.

The reason to see Operation Fortune is the characters, or rather the actors portraying them. It’s a pleasure to watch Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Cary Elwes, rapper Bugzy Malone, Josh Hartnett, & the gorgeous Hugh Grant play off each other, even if they don’t always mix well (Plaza, I’m especially looking at you). One scene, a private fundraising event on a yacht, middle of the movie, throws all the characters together brilliantly. Layers of deception, manipulation, action, costuming, art, & fashion abound, brought out by Ritchie’s impressive visual style. It’s not the best he’s ever been, but he shows he still has it. It helps, too, that Ritchie puts these beautiful people into ridiculous situations & playfully mocks them, as he always does, reminiscent of the way intelligent directors such as Howard Hawks used to have fun mocking stars like Cary Grant. That one scene makes Operation Fortune worth watching.

Surprisingly enough, there are a few half-baked ideas to consider too. The inherent national rivalries in Eastern & Western Europe. The looming threat of AI. The inhumanity of modern warfare. The question of who protects the world after the breakdown of empire. Both sexual & non-sexual friendships, & attractions between the same & the opposite sexes. Celebrity. Masculinity in the HR era (the badass Fortune convinces his company to fund his luxurious tastes by acting needy). Contemporary financial instability. Silicon Valley moguls who aspire to technocratic tyranny. Ritchie doesn’t explore any of these, but you can see him mulling them over.

Second is The Covenant, a better movie. Modest, but with a remarkable achievement: It’s the first good post-US Afghanistan retreat movie & one of the few good films I’ve seen about America in Afghanistan.

In October 2001, we deployed 1,300 US troops to Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 terror attacks. Ten years later, 98,000 American troops found themselves stationed in Afghanistan. Alongside US soldiers, military leadership employed 50,000 Afghan interpreters as well, who hoped to relocate to America via promised Special Immigrations Visas for themselves & their families.

In August 2021, this 20-year war ended with the US Armed Forces’ sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was a disaster. Many Americans & pro-American Afghans needlessly sacrificed.

A month later, the Taliban had regained control of all territory previously occupied by Americans. Over 300 interpreters & their families were immediately slaughtered by the Taliban. Thousands of others went into hiding.

The Covenant commences in 2018. American troops have been in Afghanistan for 17 years. The new recruits were in diapers on 9/11. US Army Master Sgt. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) recruits Ahmed (Dar Salim) as an interpreter. What Kinley doesn’t realize is that Ahmed accepted the job as his own revenge against Taliban members for killing his son. This inadvertently leads Kinley & his men into trouble, but when the platoon confronts the Taliban on a mission gone wrong, Ahmed saves the badly wounded Kinley by carrying him 100 kilometers through the mountains behind furious enemy lines.

Ahmed’s loyalty gets Kinley home safely, but John is restless as he deals with the moral issues that afflict the veterans of modern warfare. When Kinley discovers Ahmed & his family are in trouble, narrowly evading the Taliban, but destined for death, he finds himself compelled to act. Yet when the military authorities show little interest & government bureaucracy thwarts him everywhere, Kinley comes to see himself in pre-modern terms, bound by a debt of blood, a life for a life. So he explains himself to his wife, abandons his American life, & returns to Afghanistan, illegally, on his own dime, to succeed or die.

The Covenant proposes that America actually did have the power it needed to complete an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan but was simply unwilling, or too weak-minded, to do so. Ritchie’s tale is small-scale & restrained, but he represents each of the kinds of players. The older, war-weary soldiers who just want to serve their country well, but with an unrewarded pride. The young recruits who don’t understand their objective. The high-ranking officers, politically compromised. The locals trying to live life in an essentially pre-modern world with which the West keeps meddling but simply does not understand, locals caught between US occupation on one side & Taliban murderousness on the other. & the affected Afghan & American families. Ritchie uses his fictional but finely detailed & researched story, filmed & acted well, to convey his vision of a successful American Afghanistan Withdrawal.

This Memorial Day weekend, seek out The Covenant. It’s still in many theaters & is worth watching there. For a fun but mostly forgettable evening, try Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre too. Guy Ritchie’s films are usually worth paying attention to, & this continues to be true, despite our artistically barren cinematic landscape.