Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
Ritche then took some big-budget Hollywood swings in the 2010s, including the extremely successful (and frankly delightful) Sherlock Homes movies, a fascinating failure of a King Arthur movie, and a bizarre yet kind of fun live action Aladdin remake that made over a billion dollars. Recently Ritchie has gone back to his roots in a way, making a string of mid-budget crime capers with more or less the same crew and an assortment of his favorite actors, clearly hanging out and having fun in his comfort zone while still turning a pretty good profit at the box office. As a forever Ritchie fan, I have a much more positive reaction to his work (both old and new) than most seem to, so I'm eating well in 2023 as Ritchie has two new movies coming out within two months of each other.
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre won't do anything to convert people who are already tired of Ritchie's schtick, as it's basically a greatest hits package of everything Ritchie's schtick is. Ritchie's favorite leading man Jason Statham returns to play Orson Fortune, a super spy hired by the British government to track down a stolen device known as "The Handle", with a sinister but unknown purpose and a worth estimated at billions of dollars. Ritchie puts together a crew, including Aubrey Plaza as the wisecracking tech mastermind and Bugzy Malone as the muscle. The sale of the device to unknown parties is being handled by a mega-rich broker (Hugh Grant), and Statham and Co. utilize a dumb Hollywood actor (Josh Hartnett) to infiltrate the broker's home and learn more about the deal.
In typical Ritchie style, the more-or-less basic story is told in an extremely convoluted manner and moves at a million miles an hour, featuring more lines of dialogue and camera cuts per minute than should be physically possible. At this point you are either down with this kind of style or not; I happen to be on board.
It's a classic crime caper with not a ton of surprises or even ultimately much to say, but it's still a lot of fun. Statham can still handle the monotone action role to a T, and Hugh Grant continues his late career resurgence by playing smarmy rich assholes while scenery chewing at maximum volume. Aubrey Plaza is a mixed bag, as her usual brand of dry sassiness works well in some moments (especially when paired with Grant) but not so well when she's required to be the requisite computer hacker member of a spy crew. I'm not sure she is cast appropriately here, but it's never a bad thing to have her on screen.
Amazingly it's Josh Hartnett who steals every scene he's in as the world-famous action movie star Danny Francesco, beloved by even the seediest members of the criminal community. Francesco is a big dumb self-absorbed jock who unwillingly gets thrust in the middle of a criminal conspiracy, and Hartnett delivers every line with comedic perfection. He and Grant are having so much fun as their two characters develop an unlikely bromance; I would watch a movie about just the two of them just having ridiculous adventures.
Even as a Ritchie diehard who really enjoyed the movie, I can still acknowledge that it's not his best. The humor is a lot more inconsistent than some of Ritchie's stronger movies, and there are some story threads that are brought up only to be completely ignored. It's very apparent that there were either some reshoots late in production or lots of story changes made during editing (or both). Either way, I couldn't help but smile during most of the movie; I would take this kind of mindless action movie all day every day over most of the mega Hollywood franchises, and here's hoping Ritchie keeps doing his thing for many more years.
