Weekend Watch: The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Abigail
Guy Ritchie goes to war and criminals face a bloodsucker
Image Credit: Lionsgate Films
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, where I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Guy Ritchie tackles a based-on-truth war tale, and the Radio Silence duo unleashes a vampire. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite and Threads/Instagram: @jammerwhite
Guy Ritchie has been hopping around the genres of late, though on the small screen, he returned to his old gangster stomping ground this year with Netflix series The Gentlemen. For his newest cinematic endeavour, he’s looking to combine the quirky chattiness of his early work (and that TV series) with a truth-based war tale. Yet while it starts out in promisingly offbeat fashion, that aspect fades as the story continues and the action-comedy becomes much more straightforward and, sadly, generic.
Henry Cavill stars as Gus March-Phillips, the uncouth (yet well-educated) leader of a squad put together by order of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As the tide of World War II turns against the Allies and Nazi U-boats disrupt shipping supply lines, England teeters on the brink of defeat. Which means that March-Phillips unusual covert unit is sent on a daring mission against the Nazi war machine, adopting truly “ungentlemanly” methods of fighting in the process. Their actions paved the way for modern “black Ops” warfare.
Despite its serious themes (and the usual info dump about the heroic real-life inspirations at the end), Ritchie kicks off the tone leaning more heavily into the “comedy” side. Cavill in the early going has a blast being a cigar-stealing, Nazi-punching, tongue-showing weirdo, leading a fascinating group.
And the style is just as quirky, whether the team is taking down a battleship or infiltrating a bunker to rescue a comrade, it’s all played for violent laughs, with the likes of Alan Ritchson,
Alex Pettyfer, Eiza González, Henry Golding and Babs Olusanmokun all understanding the tone their director was going for.
Yet as the mission moves on, that jokey quality ebbs away, and you’re left with a straight-ahead war movie that cannot complete with its clear inspirations. Which is a real shame, since it’s a film of two halves –– one that’s memorably entertaining, the other that feels far more basic.
The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare is in US cinemas now. It will be streaming in the UK via Prime Video at later date.
Image Credit: Universal Pictures
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence, have more recently been cranking out updates and sequels to the Scream franchise. But before that, they were best known for the hilarious and horrific Ready Or Not, which saw Samara Weaving as a young woman who marries into a wealthy family, only to spend her wedding night running around a creepy mansion being stalked by her new in-laws who play a deadly game with certain additions to the clan.
The directors’ new effort, Abigail, could stand very neatly as a creepy mansion-themed double bill. The film finds a group of criminals looking for what they think is a relatively easy pay day by kidnapping a young girl (Alisha Weir) who has a rich father. As it turns out, once they sequester her in, yes, a creepy mansion, she’s very much more than she seems.
She is, in fact, a ballet-dancing, neck-tearing and head-ripping vampire and they her latest victims. Weir is fantastic in the title role, able to mutate her performance from wide-eyed, terrified kid to sarcastic, brutal monster with a quick twist of her expression. And her dance training mean she can pull off both the ballet sequences and the stunts necessary to be a satisfying horror villain.
And far from simply being a collection of targets to be taken out, the criminal gang is a group of chatty, characterful, colourful types played by some great actors including Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton and Kevin Durand. They’re archetypes, but the script from Stephen Shields and Guy Busick gives them purpose. The actors deftly add to that.
Abigail makes one or two missteps (including a moment near the end that stretches credibility in terms of a character’s survival), but those aren’t enough to stop this being a truly fun, bloody (really, really bloody) horror comedy with a thrilling bite.
Abigail is in UK and US cinemas now.