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Guy Ritchie Goes Brutally Posh
The purveyor of British gangster sagas goes upscale for his Inglourious Basterds knockoff, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Its aggressively facial-haired hunks, who carry out a fictionalized take on a real WWII mission called Operation Postmaster, are meant to be a disreputable group too wild for the confines of the official British military — Gus starts the film in jail, Anders cuts out Nazi hearts as trophies, and Freddy is addicted to destruction. When Quentin Tarantino had Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers, and Rod Taylor face off in that cavernous room in Inglourious Basterds, showing off accents that were respectively crisp, stiff, and jowly (with nary an actual Brit among them), it was a heightened tribute to a classic tradition of British film actors. Ritchie wasn’t at the film’s New York premiere because he’s already started on his next project — a rate that makes you wonder if his occasional good movies (the delightful The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which also featured Cavill), his returns to form (the dreadful The Gentlemen), and his for-hire hackwork ( Aladdin) have all essentially become the same to him.
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