By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
In 2024, Henry Cavill teamed up with Alan Ritchson for the World War 2 action movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. If you never saw it in theaters, you weren’t alone. The film, directed by Guy Ritchie, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, never received a wide release. Instead, it turned into a streaming hit for Amazon, and then, earlier this month, it debuted on Netflix and has been part of the Top 5 most popular movies on the larger streaming service ever since. Finally, it’s getting the attention it deserves.
Based On A True Story
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is amazingly, based on a true story of a British Commando mission in World War Two during The Blitz to disrupt supply lines. Cavill plays Gus, founder of the British Small Scale Raiding Force (which became the SAS in later years), Ritchson is the Danish officer Anders Lassen, with Alex Pettyfer and Eiza Gonzalez rounding out the rest of the main cast. Together, they undertake an off the books mission to go behind enemy lines and blow up some boats.
Like most World War 2-era heist films, it’s easy to follow the plot even through the double-crosses. The cast has incredible chemistry together which is great, as it makes the film fun, and bad, because the stakes never feel real. Henry Cavill plays Gus as a little too confident and sure of himself in every situation. Honestly, that could be how the real man handled himself. Here, it deflates a few of the otherwise tense scenes.
The most offensive part of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Alan Ritchson’s accent. He makes up for it by wearing, as my friend put it, “slutty little glasses.” Honestly, his attempts at a Danish accent work with the heightened reality of the film, that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. All you need to do is watch the title sequence where they take out a German crew, and then their entire ship. That tells you exactly what you’re in for with the rest of the movie. Now that it matters what the plot is, because you heard “Henry Cavill” and “Alan Ritchson” and already decided this was worth streaming. Because it is.
A Crowd-Pleasing Action Romp
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare isn’t one of Guy Ritchie’s best movies. The charm of the cast carries it through when the plot flounders, and it will make you wish that Cavill and Ritchson did another film together. Or that Cavill, working with Amazon on his Warhammer 40k series, would show up on Reacher. It only has a 61 percent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That is only half the story.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare has a 91 percent fresh audience score. It’s a crowd-pleasing, turn off your brain adventure. Since debuting on Netflix, it’s been charming the largest audience yet, slowly climbing the ranks until, as of the time of this writing, it’s at number two on the chart. Not every World War 2 movie has to be Inglorious Basterds, 1917, or The Great Escape, it’s alright for one to be a dumb popcorn movie.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is now streaming on Netflix.
