Welcome back to the blog readers. I recently saw the newest Guy Ritchie film Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and I wanted to share my thoughts. Starring Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Josh Hartnett, Cary Elwes, and Hugh Grant, the film sees a special ops unit headed by Statham's character Orson Fortune attempting to recover a stolen device before it can be sold.
I am one for good action films, akin to John Wick and Mission: Impossible. But when your film is absolutely formulaic with dull characters and sparing, stale action, you get Operation Fortune. Maybe it's just that I'm not on the Guy Ritchie bandwagon like some, I haven't even seen most of his films. And Jason Statham can be good in these roles when he's not completely phoning it in (I'm looking at you, Fast and Furious franchise).
My first criticism has to be the characters. Oh man, the filmmakers do not do nearly enough to get the audience invested in these characters. From the start, Orson Fortune seems like an annoying, whiney ripoff of other mercenary characters done better. Aubrey Plaza seems like she doesn't even want to be there, and she is far better than garbage like this. For Pete's sake, she's in The White Lotus and Emily the Criminal! (Disclaimer: I actually haven't seen either of these, but I hear they're good!) Josh Hartnett is actually trying his best to salvage a good performance somewhere, but it comes off as ridiculously over the top. And then Cary Elwes and Hugh Grant are just there, I guess. Nothing special about them here.
My next complaint is with the story. Good action films set up the stakes in the first act, so we know what kind of action film we're going to get. But by waiting until the final act to drop the bomb on what our main crew is after just completely took me out of the film. It made it so hard to care about what was going on that I couldn't get behind anything. And it doesn't really help when an action film is light on the one thing it's supposed to get right: the action. More on that in a bit. A good person once said that a film has to hook you within 10 minutes, and that's not something that happened here, especially when they refuse to say what exactly this special ops group is after. And it seems pretty stupid that they decide to forcibly enlist the help of an actor who barely does nothing.
Back to my biggest complaint of the film as a whole: the fact that it is billed as an action-comedy. I say that because for an action-comedy, there's not much action and not much comedy. There are only like 4 action set pieces in the entire film, and none of them made me enjoy them film any more. It seems like they were going for John Wick-like. (Speaking of John Wick-like, there's a film coming out next month called Sisu that is basically John Wick killing Nazis and it looks fucking awesome!) It's a real shame too. And as for the comedy, I'm surprised it was billed that, especially when there are no jokes. Were they trying to be funny? If they were, none of the jokes landed. And I was surprised when I found out that it was labeled as a comedy.
The one thing about this film that I actually liked was Christopher Benstead's score. It sounded like a slick and bombastic score that could have easily been mistaken for a Lorne Balfe score. To be honest, I truly thought it was him, especially because he is known for scores like that. Does he have some sort of a relationship with Balfe? Not sure here, but I'd listen to anything else he has done or will do.
To conclude my thoughts, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a lazily written, poor excuse for an action-comedy that wastes its stars' talent and our time. Thank you all for reading, and I'll see you for the next post.
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