Post by Dracula on Jul 16, 2023 8:53:25 GMT -5
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre(5/31/2023)
Guy Richie sure seems awfully busy these days and especially this year, which seems odd given that most of the movies he’s making seem to be neither smart as commercial moves nor artistic statements that are particularly worth making. You’d think that when a guy makes a Disney remake and has a successful Sherlock holmes franchise under his belt they wouldn’t bother with the Jason Statham action-movie-of-the-week projects like this, but the dude seems to want to do them. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre seemed like a project that was particularly doomed given that it had a completely unmarketable title for no good reason and also just seemed to be dumped into theaters with almost no promotion and given that it came out all of a couple weeks before Richie’s next project I’m guessing it sat around on the shelf for a while as well, but I was still at least a little intrigued by the prospect of what this was just the same. As it turns out the movie is lousy, but not in a way that’s lazy exactly so much as it’s messy and kind of doesn’t know what it wants to be. Ostensibly it’s a spy movie about an espionage team that’s only distinguished from the other Mission: Impossible ripoff teams in that they’re ostensibly mercenaries rather than agents of the state, but that rarely actually has much functional effect on how they operate in the movie. Aubrey Plaza is an interesting presence here as the team’s dedicated hacker but Jason Statham basically seems to be on autopilot throughout the movie and few of the other cast members really stand out. The action scenes aren’t much to write home about either. There are set-pieces here and there which were moderately enjoyable and the finale at least brought some decent explosions but by then I’d pretty well checked out on this rather lackluster and forgettable effort. And again, what the hell were they thinking with that title?
** out of Five
