Weekend Watch - The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

                Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is Guy Ritchie’s latest action film that opened this week in theaters, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The film is based on the now declassified British World War II Operation Postmaster and stars Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Eiza González, Babs Olusanmokun, Cary Elwes, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Henry Golding, Rory Kinnear, Til Schweiger, Freddie Fox, and Danny Sapani as the various historical characters involved in the story. It has opened, like most of Ritchie’s latest films, to mixed reviews from critics and a generally positive audience reception. Let’s get into it.

Letter Grade: C-; with good action and actors that you can tell are enjoying themselves, you can’t really say that this is a bad movie, just a bit underwhelming.

Should you Watch This Film? If this was a film you were already interested in seeing, I’d go a head and see it in theaters, but if you haven’t heard about it or weren’t intrigued by it, you’re totally fine skipping it.

Why?

                The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare manages to tell a fresh story about a period of history that feels so overdone in cinema and does it with solid action and some fun actors. I think Ritchie’s desire to be true to the historicity of the events, while admirable, weakens the film’s action sensibilities, but it’s not trying to be prestige war picture, so some of the decisions don’t make perfect sense. It’s definitely a film that pleases its target audience (TNT dads) well enough but that doesn’t hit any of its notes perfectly enough to have any kind of staying power, unlike Ritchie’s early films.

                The film has the cast of a bigtime, hard hitting action film with the plot of a more historical film. It contains three major action sequences, which should build on each other, getting more intense with each successive scene, instead peaking in the middle. The opening sequence of the film grips you immediately with Ritchie’s typical blend of humor, action, and tension, well-played by Cavill and Ritchson. The film then cuts to its flashback for exposition, explaining the details of the operation and giving us a decent idea of who each of the characters are before getting back to the next, and best, action sequence in the film – an intense breakout from a Nazi prison camp that really showcases the potential of the film that it unfortunately never really realizes again. The back half of the film is devoted to complicating the plan, introducing new and decently interesting side characters, like Danny Sapani’s Kambili Kalu and the villain Heinrich Luhr, played menacingly enough by Til Schweiger. Eiza González and Babs Olusanmokun certainly have the most to do in this portion of the film, playing the intelligence operatives who consistently have to pass information back to the British to keep Cavill’s March-Phillips and company apprised of the current state of affairs. All of this culminates in what should be a climactic action sequence of taking over a ship, escaping an island, and sabotaging a U-boat refueling depot that underwhelms at almost every turn compared to the rest of the film’s action sequences. It leaves the audience with a sense that they’ve just been watching an Assassin’s Creed film but with guns with the sheer number of faceless stealth kills and lack of climactic showdowns where the heroes’ success is ever in doubt.

                To its credit, the film is decently produced and well-cast. The film’s sound is the standout of the technical department with every scene drawing you in at the right moments through the sound engineers’ creative use of silence, cacophony, and focused sound effects, keeping everything, even the slower parts moving at an acceptable pace. By having all these World War II British soldiers and operatives played by some of the most fun people in the industry at the moment, they keep you invested in the characters even with the film’s minimal character development. González and Olusanmokun do their parts well as the on-the-ground operatives, looking the part and playing well off of each other in the process. Of the “active” group, Pettyfer feels the most out of place, mostly because his character has to be the group’s mastermind and straight man, so he doesn’t have much to do besides stand there looking good and come up with ideas. Hero Fiennes Tiffin is a surprisingly welcome addition to the cast, playing Irishman Henry Hayes as the fun young guy along for the ride. Henry Golding is the requisite unhinged explosives expert, which somehow works for him, as he gets to show off both his action and comedy skills. Cavill, as the team’s leader, feels like the inspiration for James Bond that Ritchie wanted him to be, just coming across as the coolest dude you’ve ever seen in an action movie (until you see what the guy actually looked like). But for me, and most of the audience in my theater, it was Ritchson as the Danish expat Anders Lassen who stole the show at every turn, giving the funniest and most physically impressive performance of the film (this film combined with his recent slew of tweets might finally get me to check out Reacher).

                The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare offers a solid theatrical experience with some decent action sequences and fun characters that just falls short due to an underwhelming climax and a profound lack of character development, leaning harder on its action and espionage than the characters themselves. It’s inoffensive and fun but not as fun as it could be. The story is interesting enough to feel fresh in the context of World War II, and the technique of its telling offers some solid examples of production design. If you wanted to see this film before reading this review, I think you’ll still have a solid time watching it. If you didn’t, you’re not going to miss something that changes your life. It’s a film that does just what it says it’s going to, leaving a lot on the table that could’ve made it better without ever really misstepping into “bad” territory.

Weekend Watch - Killers of the Flower Moon

                Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating and review. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is Martin Scorsese’s latest crime epic, Killers of the Flower Moon. The film opened across the U.S. this weekend amid huge buzz for the prolific filmmaker’s return to the director’s chair. Based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, the film documents the Osage Indian murders of the 1920s, focusing on the perpetrators Ernest Burkhart and William Hale and one of the survivors, Mollie Burkhart. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest, Robert De Niro as Hale, and Lily Gladstone as Mollie, and also features Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, Jenae Collins, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, and Scott Shepherd in prominent roles. Let’s get into it.

Letter Grade: B+; if a three hour and twenty-six-minute runtime sounds daunting, this film will not be your cup of tea. The positives outweigh the negatives here overall, but it’s not a film without flaws.

Review:

                Martin Scorsese is back with another weighty true crime story with some of his favorite collaborators and new faces as well. This one takes us to the plains of Oklahoma, the land of the Osage in the 1920s, where vast oil reserves made the Native Americans one of the wealthiest people groups in the world before the wealth drew American settlers looking to use intermarriage and “accidental” deaths to steal that wealth away. It’s a story that begs to be told, and Scorsese feels like one of the better choices to tell it, honoring the heritage and culture of the Osage even as he focuses the spotlight on the white perpetrators. The three central performances carry the film’s hefty runtime, not really lightening the load but making it a more acceptable slog. Is the film 20 to 40 minutes longer than it could be? Probably, but I think most of the length comes from an intentionally plodding pace rather than an excess of unnecessary story moments. It would feel a disservice to cut much of the story, but a more typical Scorsese pace could have shortened things a bit and made it more easily marketable to a wider audience.

                Your take on the latest Scorsese film will most likely come down to how willing you are to bask in the corruption and deceit of William Hale and his cronies because Scorsese really wants you to take it all in – to witness just how far American greed is willing to go and just how many people it’ll walk over to make a profit. If you come in knowing much about the story, the slow pace could frustrate rather than engulf and leave you wondering why you agreed to sit for this long watching a single film whose outcome you already knew. If you don’t know much, there’s enough from moment to moment that keeps even the slow moments engaging as the web becomes more and more complex. I’m not sure how effective putting DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart as the film’s focus is for the goal of the film, since he’s almost too much of a yes-man to feel like the scathing picture of an American capitalist that Scorsese loves to portray as his leading hero/villains. De Niro’s Hale as the lead could have been a truly chilling look at American greed, and Gladstone’s Mollie could have provided more of that victimized minority perspective were she serving as the lead instead. As it stands, the story has impact because of how tragic and seemingly thoughtless most of the deaths were, but it doesn’t go a long way in offering any modern condemnation of continuing American exploitations in the name of “progress” and capitalism.

                As I mentioned above, the three leads drive the film, even if their characters don’t necessarily receive the proper amount of screentime, respectively. DiCaprio is on his A-game as the leading man, blending the affability of Rick Dalton with the sliminess of Calvin Candy and the greed of Jordan Belfort to produce the bumbling henchman that is this film’s leading man. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to put it as the actor’s best performance, but in combining his three best performances, the actor unlocks something unforgettably gray and discomforting in this film. Gladstone turns in a career-making performance as Mollie, offering the audience a quiet but pervasive look into the viewpoint of the victims of these crimes. It’s a slow-developing performance that percolates as the plot of the film does, hitting its peak in the third act when she finally knows as much as the audience does and delivers the deathblow to Ernest’s illusions of coming back from everything that he has participated in with no lasting repercussions. It is De Niro’s performance, though, that truly dominates the film. His portrayal of William Hale will go down with Ledger’s Joker, Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, DiCaprio’s Calvin Candy, and Waltz’s Hans Landa as one of the best villains of the 21st century. He’s a character that’s so chilling because he really believes that his actions are justified and that his “good” deeds excuse any evils and victimization that result from his machinations.

                With captivating performances from its three leads and a story that absolutely has to be told, Killers of the Flower Moon outshines an excessive runtime and a focus on the wrong character to insert itself into the upper echelons of films released this year. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, especially being as long as it is, but Scorsese’s filmmaking certainly hasn’t fallen off with this latest outing.