All dressed up with nowhere new to go

 

   In Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Jason Statham joins director Guy Ritchie for a spy/caper movie that feels as if a lot of ingredients were thrown into a blender in the hope that a movie would emerge. It didn’t. Not really.

  Adopting the seriousness of a man who might have just lost his best friend, Stratham plays Orson Fortune, a mercenary who operates outside official channels. You know the drill. Orson fights the good fight but remains his own man. 

  Ritchie has been creating visual razzle-dazzle ever since his breakthrough with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, some 24 years ago. This time, he offers a less frenzied movie. We’re talking comparatively, of course.

   The story kicks off when (Cary Elwes), as a suave fellow who recruits espionage crews, enlists Orson to locate a weapon that has found its way onto the market.

   British intelligence -- represented by a character played by Eddie Marsan -- doesn't know what the object is. That's the job: Find out what's for sale and make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. 

   Joining Fortune are Aubrey Plaza (as a sexy tech whiz) and Bugzy Malone (as a sharpshooter).  Both are underutilized.

    It doesn't take long for Fortune to encounter Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), a sleazy arms dealer with tons of money. Sounding as if he's channeling Michael Caine's accent, Grant seems to be having more fun than anyone else in the movie. 

   Josh Hartnett joins in as Danny, a movie star who's supposed to help infiltrate the operation run by the star-struck Simmonds. That could happen, right?

    If you see Operation Fortune, it's probably best to give up on coherence and enjoy Grant's happy scenery chewing in a movie that sometimes plays like an off-the-rack helping of Bond. 

     Ritchie's too skilled totally to hit bottom, even with a movie that slides over what feels like old ground. Ritchie makes good use of luxe locations and (thank goodness) doesn't seem to be taking himself seriously.

     Most of the characters, by the way, are very well dressed.

     Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not recommending Operation Fortune; I’m talking about how to approach the movie if you happen to give it a try — now or in its non-theatrical afterlife.

Bullets and brawn: Guy Ritchie's latest

 

Take a look at the picture that accompanies this brief review. That's Jason Statham in another tough-guy movie from director Guy Ritchie. If you know the work that Statham and Ritchie have done together (1988's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was their first movie), you pretty well know what you'll be getting with Wrath of Man, a remake of Cash Truck, a French thriller from 2004. Statham plays a character named "H." It doesn't take long for H to find himself in a position in which he must avenge the death of his son, a hapless bystander during an armored-truck robbery.  Wrath of Man goes easy on Ritchie's customary eye-popping flourishes. Here, the director pretty much relies on stony-faced characters and a revenge saga that contains few new twists but is told with darkly expressed competence and  a familiar disregard for chronological order. Not surprisingly, Ritchie pours on the violence, which becomes increasingly easier to tune out as the movie progresses. Ritchie and Statham have made four films together, although it's been 15 years since their last collaboration. This time, Statham and Ritchie deliver the expected goods, the worth of which depends on your tolerance for this kind of movie. Oh, by the way, other actors crop up from time-to-time. Among them: Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett, and Scott Eastwood. You can place bets on who in the supporting cast will make it to the finish line.

Cast lifts familiar British gangster movie

Director Guy Ritchie may not be breaking new ground in The Gentlemen, but his actors provide the movie with some juice.

If the year were 1999 instead of 2020, director Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen might have seemed more inventive. Ritchie, you'll recall, made his cinematic bones with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a fresh-feeling foray into a netherworld occupied by British gangsters.

In this outing, Ritchie again goes gangster but the verve that once defined Ritchie's style now feels a little proforma, something on the order of the difference between an arranged marriage and a spontaneous love affair.

After striking out with King Arthur (2017), it’s not surprising that Ritchie sought comfortable ground — and, to be fair, The Gentlemen derives a fair measure of entertainment from a spot-on cast.

Notable among a large ensemble is Hugh Grant, playing a sleazy, gay private detective with traces of cockney in his accent. Colin Farrell adds more color as Coach, a character who trains boxers and occasionally dips into the dark arts required to settle matters in the criminal world.

Add an unflappable Charlie Hunnam to the mix. Hunnam rides shotgun to Matthew McConaughey, who plays Mickey, a pot czar who pays off fading aristocrats for the privilege of building vast underground grow houses on their property.

Now another American (Jeremy Strong) wants to buy Mickey's vast empire so that he can reap illegal gains and be ready to capitalize when marijuana goes legit. Tired of life in the fast lane, Mickey may be willing to sell.

A Chinese gangster named Dry Eye (Henry Golding) also would like to purchase Mickey’s business, an ambition that sets off fireworks, notably a raid on one of Mickey’s mammoth facilities.

To add structural pizazz, Ritchie frames the story by having Grant’s character try to extort money from Hunnam’s character, using a screenplay to convince Ray to pay up. The screenplay gambit proves a bit much, even in a movie that's not afraid to display its cinematic self-consciousness.

True to its title, The Gentlemen is mostly an all-guys affair, although the dashing Mickey has a greyhound sleek wife (Michelle Dockery) who runs a garage staffed by many female mechanics. Mickey, we're told, relies on her judgment.

It takes time to get all the characters straight and to fully appreciate The Gentlemen, you need a taste for a narrative that hopscotches through the proceedings, sometimes creating confusion. You also may find yourself wondering whether any of these characters possibly could exist outside a Guy Ritchie movie.

Still, there’s pleasure in watching actors sink into juicy roles as we wait to see who among these felons will emerge as the king of the gangster jungle. In January, that may as good as we get.

'Aladdin' -- neither detestable nor wonderful

Disney's live-action version of its 1998 animated smash climbs on a magic carpet but doesn't soar.

Will Smith has been assigned the unenviable task of trying to do what Robin Williams did for the 1992 animated version of Aladdin; i.e., turn Disney's latest live-action remake into a monster hit. I’m not sure that the live-action version of Disney's take on a fabled tale from the Arabian Nights will be a box-office smash, but credit Smith with not flinching at taking the role of the fabled genie. He's the life of what can be a tepid party.

As for the rest of Aladdin, call it a mixed bag of garish colors, cliched applications of anything that might be called “Arabian” and musical numbers that often sound as if we've heard them before, probably because we have. Most of the tunes were in the animated version and, for the most part, are presented here without scoring bullseyes.

The story remains generally unaltered, although Disney has adjusted the proceedings to add a bit of ethnic flavor, more or less in the way that blush is applied to a pale cheek. Aladdin, the market thief who aspires to be a prince so that he can win the hand of a princess, is played by Canadian actor Mena Massoud. Princess Jasmin is portrayed by Naomi Scott, who sells her songs with ease and who occasionally even looks as if she might be an animated character who has sprung to life. Marwan Kenzari portrays the villainous Jafar, the conniving vizier who wants to replace the kindly Sultan of Agrabah (Navid Negahban).

Guy Ritchie, who made a splash in 1989 with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, who directed Robert Downey in a couple of Sherlock Holmes movies and who directed the epically awful King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, takes the reins. Ritchie manages the movie's special effects, CGI creatures (notably a pet monkey named Abu) and makes the most of Smith’s genie, a blue muscleman whose lower half consists of puffs of swaying smoke.

The movie's best set piece involves the arrival of Aladdin and a large entourage at the court. Aladdin masquerades as Prince Ali so that he can conform to local law. The princess, we’re told, only can marry a prince.

The princess’s handmaiden (Nasim Pedrad) adds welcome conspiratorial girlfriend flare and eventually becomes a love interest for the genie, whose greatest desire is to escape his lamp and become an ordinary human.

At times, the movie has a garish Bollywood flavor, leaning heavily on splashy colors and costumes, outsized turbans and ornate interiors that look like more costly descendants of the kind of faux international settings Bob Hope and Bing Crosby used to traipse across in their road movies.

I found Massoud’s Aladdin to be a bit bland; Scotts’s Jasmine -- more assertive in this version -- proves better and, as stated, Smith’s Genie basically leads the way to the happily-ever-after conclusion the tale must have.

Ritchie's rendition of a Disney cash cow may not be the kind of magic carpet ride that transports you to entertainment's most magical realms, but if there must be live-action remakes of animated movies, I suppose this one suffices.

Lock, stock and a smokin' hot sword

King Arthur gets the Guy Ritchie treatment -- and suffers for it.

In King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, director Guy Ritchie goes medieval on us, and the result is bleary-eyed, loud and full of summer-movie bluster.

Ritchie, who broke onto the international film scene with his kinetic gangster epic, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and who brought us a couple of big-ticket Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., goes further back in history, but, unfortunately, brings his adrenalized sensibilities along with him.

These emerging Knights of the Round Table talk with cockney-inflected accents as Ritchie tells an origins story about how King Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) came to lead his kingdom. In this version, a young Arthur escapes slaughter by an evil king wannabe named Vortigern (Jude Law). Vortigern robs Arthur of his throne by killing the boy's father (Eric Bana), an actor who amazingly manages to look composed in the midst of all the visual chaos.

Raised in a brothel as a child of the streets, Arthur's story begins in earnest when he pulls Excalibur, his father's sword, from the rock where it has been embedded for most of the young man's life. Arthur's feat is accompanied by an oops. Once Vortigern knows where the real heir to throne is, he sees only one option: Arthur must be killed.

Meanwhile, a multi-cultural band of comrades -- notably Djimon Hounsou's Bedivere and Tom Wu's George -- goad a reluctant Arthur toward his destiny.

Ritchie heaves shards of Arthur's story at us in ways that add confusion to a narrative that seems to have been invented to support a variety of booming set pieces. In one of them, Arthur visits the Dark Lands to fight bats and rats as part of his inner journey; i.e., before he can triumph, Arthur must remember the murder of his mother and father at the hands of Law's evil Vortigern.

In many respects, Ritchie's approach to the Arthurian legend owes more to Marvel Comics than it does to English mythology. One difference: It's not Arthur who has super powers, but his sword. Arthur must learn to wield this glowing weapon throughout the course of a cluttered, 126-minute running time.

The movie's editing style seems to have been inspired by the desire to inflict a thousand cuts on any given moment. Accompanied by Daniel Pemberton's pounding score, the movie barrels its way through action sequences that produce more frenzy than coherence.

When Arthur swings his sword, the movie slows down as if it's showing us the way an athlete enters what some call "the zone." Arthur perceives everything in slow motion, vanquishing foe after foe with an ease he barely remembers when the carnage stops, and the movie renews its double-time pacing.

Arthur's attempts to impress with scale are obvious from the outset: The movie's opening -- a prolog, really -- offers displays of carnage featuring mammoth creatures that resemble the kind of elephants that might appear as floats if a Thanksgiving parade were run by Satanists.

Hunnam takes a step back after his work in The Lost of City Z, which made room for subtlety. Think Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim, in which Hunnam also appeared. But in fairness to Hunnam, a set of leather pants, a buffed torso, and a street-wise attitude do not a character make.

Looking as if he's reprising the most malicious moments of the character he played in HBO's The Young Pope, Law supplies the expected hiss/boo helping of murderous villainy.

Astrid Berges-Frisbey adds a feminine touch as The Mage, some sort of magical character who helps Arthur realize his role this teeming fantasy world.

I suppose Ritchie deserves some credit for trying not to genuflect at the feet of a well-worn legend, but he drags the story of Arthur into the dirt and never allows it to shake off the mud.

Ritchie batters an estimable story, and, I'm afraid, it winds up beating him to a pulp.

An acceptable 'Man from U.N.C.L.E.'

Director Guy Ritchie never quite finds the right buoyancy, but his revival of a'60s TV hit proves entertaining enough.

What's at stake in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., director Guy Ritchie's belated attempt to bring a '60s TV series to the big screen?

The end of the word; that kind of thing.

That's the nonchalantly delivered answer given by one the characters in a story about two reluctant partners -- an American CIA agent and a Soviet spy -- who must recover a nuclear bomb from fiends who want to control the world.

The year: 1963. The attitude? Shall we say, relaxed?

Ritchie -- of Sherlock Holmes fame -- takes an unusually low-key approach to spy material that, wisely, I think, has been kept in its original period rather than straining for a contemporary update.

Ritchie doles out the action sparingly in a movie in which '60s styles provide a substantial part of the pleasure. Credit on-the-nose work from the movie's set decorators and from costume and art directors who create a witty, nostalgia-laced environment.

Entertaining without finding quite the right buoyancy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. casts Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) as Napoleon Solo, a smooth-talking thief who's forced into the service of the CIA.

A blandly handsome Cavill would have done well to add a bit of twinkle to at least one of Solo's eyes.

Armie Hammer does better as Illya Kuryakin, the Russian KBG agent who's teamed with Solo in what amounts to an origins story about how the spy organization U.N.C.L.E. gets its start.

Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) plays an East German auto mechanic who's thrown into the mix. She proves more interesting than either of the male leads.

A subdued Hugh Grant has a small role as the head of U.N.C.L.E., a role played by Leo G. Carroll in the TV series, which ran from 1964-1968 and attained broadcast blockbuster status.

For the record Robert Vaughn portrayed Solo in the original; David McCallum played Illya.

A routine plot falls short of espionage greatness. Solo and Illya are assigned to find Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel), a German scientist who who has been captured by the movie's villains and forced to build a nuclear bomb.

Solo and Illya hope Vikander's Gaby, who happens to be Teller's daughter, will lead them to her father. The journey takes everyone to Rome.

Added to all this are a wealthy, stylish villainess (Elizabeth Debicki) and a former Nazi (Sylvester Groth), another obvious bad guy.

Groth anchors Ritchie's slyly comic treatment of an obviously serious torture situation, one of the movie's droller moments.

Should there be a sequel -- and the movie is set up for one -- Ritchie and company may work out some of the kinks, which include lighting a fire under Cavill.

Meanwhile, what arrives on screen qualifies as reasonable, mid-August entertainment that goes down easily, despite its problems.

Lavish and colorful, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. also is a little less crazed than Ritchie's work in the frenetic Sherlock Holmes series. For me, that's a plus.

'Sherlock Holmes,' the Franchise Continues

As a version of Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows doesn't cut it. As a big movie action contraption, it's passable.

Forget the Sherlock Holmes once known as a detective with a keen and unforgiving intelligence. That Holmes -- a creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- has vanished inside a much more contemporary creation: a kick-ass movie franchise.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -- the second movie starring Robert Downey Jr. (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Dr. Watson) - seems less interested in celebrating Holmes' legendary powers of deduction than in flexing as much action-movie muscle as possible.

So it should come as no surprise that the plot doesn't much matter, except to say that it pits Holmes against arch rival James Moriarty, played here by a bearded, confidently evil Jared Harris.

In the early going, Holmes frets over Watson's impending marriage. Few other renderings of Sherlock have flirted so openly with Holmes and Watson's infatuation with each another, and this one goes so far as give them an improbable comic scene in which they waltz together. If I remember correctly, Holmes leads.

If you saw the first installment, you pretty much know director Guy Ritchie's game. Ritchie sees Holmes as a disheveled detective who's as quick with his fists as he is with his wits. For his part, Downey lives up to this image of Holmes, seldom looking as if he's not in need of a bath.

The banter between Holmes and Watson doesn't exactly reach Noel Coward levels, and there's no enjoying Game of Shadows if you don't revel in amped-up action, including the firing of some very heavy artillery.

Even taken on its own terms, the movie is not without miscalculation: Noomi Rapace, the brilliant Swedish actress who created the role of Lizbeth Salander in the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is entirely wasted as gypsy woman who's shoehorned into the movie for plot reasons.

Surely, Rapace could have made larger contribution; her role is the dramatic equivalent of a guy who holds another guy's coat during a fistfight.

Stephen Fry fares better in a genuinely amusing role as Holmes' diplomat brother, Mycroft Holmes. Fry's comic talents are used to best effect in a scene in which he appears nude. (No, we don't see enough of Fry to challenge the movie's PG-13 rating.)

When not busy changing costumes, Holmes' tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that has something to do with arms sales and with setting various European countries at one another's throats. But let's be honest: There's nothing much at stake here aside from getting to the next action set piece and maintaining the scaffolding of characters and effects that keeps the series from toppling.

Game of Shadows does that - and so it probably should be regarded as a passable addition to a successful franchise. I didn't love Game of Shadows, but I didn't mind Ritchie's latest action contraption, either. Perhaps because nothing about this helping of Sherlock Holmes needs to be taken seriously - and Ritchie seems to know it.