Guy Ritchie cut his teeth on action/crime movies, and it does to a certain extent make sense that he might want to try his hand at starting his own James Bond franchise. That does seem to be what Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre appears to be. Jason Statham has been working with Ritchie since Ritchie’s debut feature Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and Statham is the sort of tough guy British actor who fits in well with Ritchie’s sort of work. Factor in that this sort of movie isn’t too far off from his usual oeuvre, and there’s no reason to think Operation Fortune shouldn’t at least be fun for the casual moviegoer.
Besides, if the movie bombs, Ritchie’s next directorial effort, The Covenant, is coming out next month.
A daring heist has hit a secret lab, leaving a lot of security guards dead and something stolen. That is literally all the British government knows, so that means Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes) will need to put a team together. His top choice is expensive freelance operative Orson Fortune (Statham), a man whose best skills involves manipulating systems to his advantage. He’ll be joined by two newcomers: American hacker and tech expert Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza) and young up-and-comer JJ Davies (Bugzy Mallone). However, there are a number of problems. Mostly because the British government only knows something was stolen. They don’t know who took it, who they are selling it to, or even what it is. They just call it “the Handle”. The only thing they figure out fairly quickly is that the middleman appears to be billionaire arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant).
Simmonds is known to be a very reclusive fellow, someone who has the tightest security possible and would be very difficult to get to see under any circumstances. However, Fortune knows his one weakness: he is a huge fan of movie star Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett). It doesn’t take too much effort to coerce Danny’s help to infiltrate Simmonds’s inner circle with Sarah posing as Danny’s girlfriend and Fortune as his manager. But there’s one other issue: someone hired one of Fortune’s rivals, Mike (Peter Ferdinando), to likewise find the mystery object, and while Mike doesn’t seem as good at the job as Fortune, he does seem to have far more people and resources at his disposal than Fortune’s own small team. From there, Fortune will need to find out who stole the item, who is buying it, and what it even is. Can he do it?
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: an actor’s involvement with some government agents to infiltrate a big billionaire arms dealer fan’s compound is pretty much the plot of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. However, Operation Fortune doesn’t just have a lot less Nicolas Cage, but it also focuses far more on the agents. Hartnett’s Danny is not all that central to the plot, coming across as more of a supporting player. This one is really more about Statham’s Fortune and how he does what he does. He’s a guy who enjoys the finest luxuries on the British government’s dime, and while he isn’t a womanizer (I was a bit surprised how chummy Statham and Plaza are at the end of the movie given how little build-up there is to anything like that), he does come across as a James Bond with what I am guessing is a working class British accent. I’m no expert on British accents, mind, but Statham’s never struck me as upperclass.
That said, this isn’t that great a movie. Ritchie’s fans will probably enjoy this one for what it is, but it also feels like something he could pull off without much effort. Plaza feels miscast or at least given dialogue that, while meant to be funny, doesn’t work with her personal delivery style. Statham has done this sort of role many times, and while there are some good twists to the plot, I never felt much urgency from anything going. The one really good thing going on here is Grant, playing a particularly slimy, fast-talking businessman who seems to be having fun. He’s a fan of the Danny character, but he never goes full fanboy, and he still comes across as a man in full control when he needs to, a man with a style of his own such that it’s not hard to see why Hartnett’s Danny seems as much a fan of Simmonds as Simmonds is of Danny. But beyond that, well, I hope Ritchie did a better job on The Covenant.
Grade: C
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