Like many moviegoers, I absolutely adored Guy Ritchie’s 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its 2000 follow-up, Snatch. They were fresh, irreverent, fun and exciting. After that I eagerly anticipated each new Guy Ritchie film, hoping for more. Alas, he broke my heart, repeatedly, and has never managed to equal the pure, ground-breaking fun of those two films. 

These days he can best be described as a “journeyman” director, dutifully and capably making the generic actioners the investors want. Drivel like Revolver, Man from U.N.C.L.E., and some pretty awful Will Smith music videos. (It would be rude to even mention the phenomenally misguided remake of Swept Away that he did for his then wife, Madonna. Or Aladdin.)

Lately, I’m seeing in his films, this one included, a pattern, a formula. Get a bunch of hunky actors together (in this case Alan Ritchson, Henry Cavill, Alex Pettyfer), arm them heavily, and have them go kill bad guys. Then give the film a tongue-in-cheek, stiff-upper-lip, preferably too-long title. Jolly good!

The source material, cartoonishly modified, is the true story of a covert squad of renegades that Winston Churchill tasked with cutting off the support ships that supplied Hitler’s Atlantic U-boat fleet.  It’s mostly shootin’ and killin’ of Nazi soldiers who either don’t know how to aim a rifle or don’t have any bullets. None of our heroes is even winged, and this superhero quality drains off any suspense or tension. 
Ritchie, however, keeps things moving briskly, and it has some value as a time waster, maybe for teens. But even they will forget it before they leave the theater. P.S.: If you want to watch a much better Nazi-killing flick, rent Sisu. (122 min)