Review: Long before Bond, ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ kicked off British covert ops

Guy Ritchie’s latest, the cumbersomely titled “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” is at once his “Inglourious Basterds” and his “Dunkirk.” With his adaptation of the 2016 nonfiction book “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops” by historian and war reporter Damien Lewis, Ritchie borrows Quentin Tarantino’s winking postmodern retro style to pay homage to real-life British war heroes with the same reverence that Christopher Nolan paid to the heroes of Dunkirk. If Tarantino uses a stylistic pastiche of 1960s and ’70s exploitation films and spaghetti westerns in order to rewrite history to his own liking, Ritchie borrows Tarantino’s approach to perform a kind of pulpy myth-making and celebrate a group of undersung real-life war heroes. Though it is not named as such in the film, which is heavily imagined and fictionalized with the addition of a few new characters, the script, which is by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel and Ritchie, essentially follows the 1942 special-operations mission known as “Operation Postmaster.” Concerned about the interference of German U-boats throttling England’s ability to receive supplies, Winston Churchill gives the go-ahead for Brigadier Gubbins’ “M” to hire the right man to target an Italian freighter loaded with U-boat supplies. While Ritchie structures the film around tense conversations and bursts of violence, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a bit languidly paced in between and isn’t that suspenseful.