★★★★

starring: jason statham, aubrey plaza, cary elwes, and hugh grant

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REVIEWER: lyall carter

Special agent Orson Fortune and his team of operatives recruit one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars to help them on an undercover mission when the sale of a deadly new weapons technology threatens to disrupt the world order.

Super spy Orson Fortune must track down and stop the sale of a deadly new weapons technology wielded by billionaire arms broker Greg  Simmonds. Reluctantly teamed with some of the world’s best operatives, Fortune and his crew recruit Hollywood’s biggest movie star Danny Francesco to help them on their globe-trotting undercover mission to save the world.

Director Guy Ritchie has had a renaissance of sorts in the last couple of years. 2019’s The Gentlemen and 2021’s The Wrath of Man (both brilliant - find them, check them out) kept the best of his early success - gangsters, humour, with a lick of violence thrown in for good measure and brought a mature, slick edge to them. 

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Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a continuation of that renaissance while giving us his version of a modern spy thriller (The Man from U.N.C.L.E being his brilliantly underrated take on a 60’s spy flick). And it’s just what you’d expect. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a slick, little bit cheeky, action packed, knee slappingly hilarious, thoroughly entertaining spy thriller. 

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Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre follows a typical spy thriller narrative borrowing from everything from James Bond to Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise. But what makes Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre unique is its iteration of its main characters primarily through the actors playing them and the unique Guy Ritchie flourishes. 

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While not nearly as a crisscross web of a plot as his earlier films, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre still has a couple of plot plates spinning at once. There are some flourishes in the development of Statham’s protagonist Orson Fortune; he’s good at what he does, but he has pretty expensive tastes. However the story loses a little bit of its shape in the final act as it gets caught up in a gluttony of information, double crossing, and dual agendas, but is still damn entertaining. 

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And Ritchie gets it. He gets how to make a fun, entertaining time at the cinema. He doesn’t take it all too seriously, and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is filled to the brim with hilarious scenarios and witty dialogue. It’s also a little bit cheeky, with Plaza and Grant getting the most of (and delivering them beautifully) of those lines. 

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Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a slick, little bit cheeky, action packed, knee slappingly hilarious, and thoroughly entertaining spy thriller.