3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre

2023, Guy Ritchie (Wrath of Man) -- download

In my current state of Finally Having Proper Internet (1.5GB FTTH), I am starting to download 4K copies of movies. The problem is that the PC that powers our piratical media sharing is aging, and therefore only certain formats will transcode to the TV properly. Watching this movie required 4 attempts at finding the Right Copy before actually sitting, and watching the movie. And as it ended, we noticed it sitting, legally and free, on Amazon.

Sigh.

That said, I always commented that I would continue to Pirate until the days it became easier to buy/rent than to find the pirate sources. I don't pirate games anymore, not for more than a decade, because just waiting for them to drop in price is easier. I have lessened my movie & TV piracy because I have subscribed to a bunch of services that provide me more than enough content to watch legally. The only thing that was stopping me from Renting first-run movies via one of the many services was speed -- who wants to wait an hour for a Rented Movie to actually download. Now they can just zip along happily. We shall have to see if I make the transition.

Movie? Oh yeah, the movie. 

If you thought it was strange that Guy Ritchie has two movies coming out consecutively (Jake Gyllenhaal's actioner The Covenant is right around the corner) you are not wrong. This movie was done in 2021, and the distributers considered it rather crass to release a movie (in 2022) featuring Ukrainian Bad Guys, so they shelved it until now. But the movie seemed to have suffered other issues in its delays, in that it feels like editing & interference had it abandoning some plots and glossing over other aspects, giving it an unfinished, unpolished feel.

That said, a Guy Ritchie spy caper is still kind of fun, and fun was to be had.

Orson Fortune (Jason Statham playing Jason Statham, Spy) is an adventurer for hire, brought into the game by his handler Nathan (Cary Elwes, Stranger Things) at the behest of the British government, to get a MacGuffin called "the handle", an AI thingy-ma-jiggy that we have seen before (usually stored on a thumb drive or small SSD in a brief case), but this one takes down financial markets. Other such devices, in other movies, have shut down power grids (The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard) or had the ability to launch nuclear missiles anywhere, everywhere (Citadel). It doesn't matter what they do, only that it is Bad, and that they can be easily transported, usually in a secure brief-case.

The movie begins with a focus on Fortune building his team, not being able to get John, because John is currently working for Fortune's rival Mike, so Orson ends up with American Sarah (Aubrey Plaza, Legion). John is the best, so Fortune has to be convinced she is a good substitute.

"Save my wife," intones the courier of The Handle, just before he dies, at the hands of Mike's team. They don't. In fact, the movie forgets there was a wife at all. Is Orson really all that good-er than Mike, if he just lets her die? I think the editor was probably the real villain here.

Anywayz, The Handle is on its way to Cannes, to a charity auction hosted by Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant, D&D: Honor Among Thieves) playing pretty much the same character he did in Ritchie's The Gentleman, albeit with more money. Its not that Grant is being type-cast, more that he enjoys playing up to his aging status, being these leathery, pompous, arrogant villains. Anywayz, to get into Cannes, they recruit Simmonds fav movie star, Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett, Wrath of Man).

What happens after becomes a blur of all caper, espionage and spy flicks: fancy places, fancy clothes, fancy parties, fancy cars, Bad Guys fancying femme fatales. Its surprising it took this long for Ritchie to do one of these flicks, as he is the master of ensemble casts and colourful characters, and this genre meshes well with that ideal. Alas, it struck me as a victim of production foibles, for as it is fun to behold, there really isn't much behind it. Oh, you could say that for a lot of Ritchie flicks, but most of his stories are full of twists & turns, secrets and masks that eventually reveal themselves. Being a spy flick, there is not much Reveal to be had, so the fun to be had is in the ... fun. It felt like it needed to be amped up a bit, Sarah being even more Aubrey Plaza, and Fortune being even more Jason Statham.

Alas those production foibles just felt too ever present, leaving gaps. For example, at the beginning of the movie, it was all John John John. Once Sarah is onboard, we forget about John until, "Oh, hey! That's John! Ooops, John is dead." It felt like the movie wanted to be quippy about how essential John was and then... forgot.