Bondsploitation is a tough subgenre to crack. Barring the “realist” depictions of on-screen espionage like your average le Carre adaptation or one of the Bourne movies, there’s a decent argument to be made that most movies about super-spies fall somewhere on its spectrum. You’ve got your outright parodies (the Flint, Austin Powers, and Matt Helm series), your localized approximations of 007 (OSS 117, which predates Bond but bears his influence on screen, The Man From U.N.C.L.E and the whole Eurospy genre), the anti-Bonds (the Harry Palmer movies, XXX) and then the films trading on the presence of former Bonds in lead roles (Ffolkes, The Russia House). Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre functions as a kind of pseudo-sequel to his own Man From U.N.C.L.E. adaptation, with its debt to Eurospy style, tinged with a big of humor that wouldn’t be out of place in your typical parody. It’s easy to envision Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in lead roles here, even though the team featured is a bit larger than it would have been in that format. What it shares with its spiritual predecessors is an overly complex plot, often failed humor, and the occasional moment of real joy glimpsed like beams of light through a pinhole-strewn wall.
These are all often characteristics of Ritchie’s work. Often they’re the reason his films are so successful — everything I enjoyed about Wrath of Man is present here in some capacity, from the pace to his understanding of his ensemble’s skills to Jason Statham himself — but when it’s in service of a story like this one, these attributes start to grate a little bit. Here’s as brief of a summary of the plot as I can muster: after a break-in at a South African black ops site, the British government turns to their stable of freelancers in order to recover whatever was stolen. See, the Brits don’t know exactly what it was, but it’s surely something important given chatter on the back ends, and whatever it is, it can’t be good for the Crown. The incredibly-named Orson Fortune (Statham) is rudely ripped from his holiday by his handler (Cary Elwes), and is tasked with finding out what this mysterious MacGuffin is and recovering it from those looking to sell it. He’s joined by computer whiz Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) and wetworks operator JJ (Bugzy Malone), and they soon discover that the device’s sale is being brokered by Greg Simmons (Hugh Grant), an arms dealer who likes to cuckold famous people, so they enlist a Hollywood star (Josh Hartnett) to go along with the desperate-for-field-work Sarah and get in his good graces, while Orson and JJ work in the shadows, fending off a rival group of contractors hunting for the same thing.
There are about four or five solid threads for a movie here, and Ritchie wanted to include all of them, so they’re predictably truncated. But the truly strange aspect of Operation Fortune is its attempt to straddle the divide between its dueling tone — badass Statham movie and outright comedy — and it bucks and rocks like it’s on a mechanical bull. The first hour or so of the film is its best, when Ritchie comes closest to straight screwball antics (this isn’t Austin Powers, after all, and it’s all played with a wink as opposed to a hammy grin), with Statham serving as straight man to Plaza and Elwes’s droll sarcasm, and with Grant genuinely stealing scenes as is his fashion when he teams up with Ritchie for goofball antics, sporting a spray tan, white veneers and a creepy disposition. But the action and the devotion to the confusing espionage plot, whose stakes are explained in an agonizingly slow fashion, distract from a lot of the fun. It feels like Ritchie is holding back in almost every category — the humor isn’t as punchy as it should be, and the action is more inert than you’d like it to be — though glimpses of his typically clever skills in the edit suite are still a prime focus and feature. The film’s opening, which cuts the smash-and-grab in South Africa with Elwes’ walk through stately hallways after being summoned by his government masters, is well-executed, with the clack of his heels on the smooth floors adding a rhythm to the action.
There are some moments like that one, but they’re scattered across the two-hour runtime, which feels even longer thanks to Ritchie’s aggressive pace. The structure of Wrath of Man lent itself well to his breakneck pace, with each chapter of the story acting as its own little narrative, but when applied to an unbroken tale as long and as vague as this one, Operation Fortune just drags on and on. It’s a problem that many of the Bondsploitation flicks suffer from: with few resources on hand to replicate Bond’s charms fully, they often imitate the traits that they can, including the runtime and the winding nature of the narrative. But the intangibles — a leading man’s charm, the clarity of the stakes, and, frankly, the name itself — are incredibly difficult to replicate. Even the not-Bond Bonds (Never Say Never Again, the other Casino Royale), endowed with the IP sauce, struggled with this, so it’s a genuinely hard task for a filmmaker to overcome. It’s still great to see Ritchie exploring his interests outside of the traditional studio framework with the same kind of panache he kicked off this decade with. Still, Operation Fortune can’t overcome the limitations of its genre forefathers.