Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. This movie just came out last Thursday, and I can genuinely say I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. This movie follows a secret combat unit made up of a motley crew of rogues and mavericks, created by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a group of military officials, whose goal is to neutralize Hitler’s fleet of German U-Boats during World War II. The top secret combat unit also uses unconventional techniques to battle the Nazis and change the course of the war. This is also based on a true story, and to my knowledge, for the most part, the story is told very accurately. Going in I was mainly just expecting a normal action/war movie, as it was advertised. However, I was very surprised and glad to see the amount of comedy they were able to fit in here between the main group of rogues. The main group are played by Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, and Alex Pettyfer. All of these guys had fantastic chemistry together and were able to play off each other very well.
The main antagonist of this movie is Heinrich Luhr, and I wasn’t the biggest fan of the character, but the actor did play him very well. Obviously just a pure evil man, but there’s no depth to his character at all outside of that. Two of the other main characters were Mr. Heron and Marjorie Stewart, and I also wasn’t the biggest fan of their storyline. Whenever the main group of guys were on screen, the movie was very good and moved along very well. However, I just do not feel the same when Heron and Stewart were on screen. Those two had their own storyline, which mainly focused on Luhr and setting up the third act. Don’t get me wrong this movie does need that story for it to make sense and to get to the ending, I just feel like the writers could’ve done a better job at making that story interesting. The action in this movie was very good though, when used. It wasn’t overused at all and the sequences were very well choreographed.
I always rate the movies I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie a 76/100, like I’ve said it’s a good movie, that definitely has its bright spots, and it’s propped up by a very good cast. However, pacing was a major issue as I mentioned before at times. The antagonist also didn’t move me at all and the score was nothing special. The main group of guys definitely pushed this movie up way more than it should have, and in total I still had a good time with it.
Alex – I enjoyed it
