Xtreme Vogue Mumbai Desk: Komal Qureshi
Star Cast: Hugh Grant, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Statham, Cary Elwes, and ensemble.
Director: Guy Ritchie.
What’s Good: For a film so juvenile, coming from a filmmaker so skillful is short, so you don’t have to keep bearing the pain.
What’s Bad: That Guy Ritchie saw this script and thought this could sit in his filmography, which also has Sherlock Holmes.
Loo Break: You can take one whenever you want because the formula is so simple and straightforward that you don’t have to invest much.
Watch or Not?: It’s releasing digitally now, but maybe time is money, and you should not waste it.
Language: English.
Available On: Lionsgate Play.
Runtime: 109 Minutes.
User Rating:
Like always, a massive illegal arms technology deal is underway, and the world is at risk. Two agents and a Hollywood superstar set out to stop the deal and end up gate-crashing the bad man’s palace. How they prevent this and us from walking away of the film.
Script Analysis
Guy Ritchie’s cinema is about selling suspension of disbelief impressively and not letting the audience know they have surrendered to his idea of the world. It is bizarre, and colourful, and there are elements that cannot leak through in the real world, villains that were funny but still impactful, but with his mastery, he sold all of it, and we as an audience have bought it multiple times. But until he decided to look at a script so Inept and assume that his audience deserves this story out of the infinite competent ones that live in and around him.
Operation Fortune can be loosely defined as the thought begin Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery gone abysmally bad. But the movies are about the rich obsessing over their richness, almost fantasising and exploiting the world to keep the money flowing in. The absurdity of their existence and how comical it is to look at them without fear is how both the movies approached their antagonists. But in Ritchie’s world, unlike Rian Johnson, there is no awareness of its concept. Instead, the movie decides to be so clueless that it just begins out of nowhere. Yes, opening a movie right in the middle of an episode is a plot device, but you don’t expect the audience just to assume what your world is.
The assumption that the audience knows everything and that we don’t need to explain takes a whole lot of mettle away from Operation Fortune. There is so much in the story that could make for an entertaining action drama that even had a stellar casting. But Guy Ritchie, with his writers Ivan Atkinson, and Marn Davies, chooses to play on the surface level with no in-depth exploration of any character or storyline. The guns, and the blasts, and the fancy CGI showing multiple missiles being launched as an ultimatum isn’t something new. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has already used and showcased half of the expertise CGI and VFX can be used for. Where is the story to support those visuals?
For a movie that involves a movie star, and even criticizes the culture where a character claims that a star charged $10 million to come out of a cake and sing the birthday song at a party, the movie takes to efforts to keep that conversation going. If you start to talk about a system and choose to take a dig right at the beginning, why not explore that tangent more. This is satire potential wasted royally. Also, who exactly knows anything in this world about the deal because everyone is as clueless as the audience. What are they fighting for or with in that case?
Star Performance
Jason Statham is technically playing an evaporated version of his past characters and cake walking this part that doesn’t in any way pay homage to his long collation with Guy Ritchie. FYI they have five films together in their filmographies. The actor is given a part so loosely written that his trajectory stops making any sense, and I, for one, even forgot what his relevance was to the story in the first place.
Aubrey Plaza has made fans for even her smirk and that gaze. But here she is only left with them, and some very bizarre comical exchanges with Statham that looked like were written by a juvenile intern. Together there is nothing they evoke in the audience. Plaza was last in The White Lotus 2, where she owned every frame she was in, why would you do this to an actor of her calibre.
Hugh Grant is the only person having fun with his character because he gets to be insane and he loves that of course. He is the the antithesis of all the gangsters you have seen and the actor is having fun dissecting and breaking the mould of a villain.
Josh Harnett cast as a superstar is a lost opportunity. For a director who could bring in any big star and make them play themselves on screen creating a meta world, he choses to employ an actor and making him play an actor.
Direction, Music
The scary part is that Guy Ritchie is now convinced that these movies are his sweet spot and that the world doesn’t understand him. We do, Guy, we have loved your cinema, but this is not what we want for deserve from you. Go back to the yore where your films were campy but also made sense. Operation Fortune does no good to anyone and not to Ritchie at all.
The Last Word
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is an opportunity wasted, and anybody could tell you that, even if not a cinema connoisseur. Even Guy Ritchie deserves better in this case.
Ruse de Guerre Trailer
