Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre — half baked

With it the recipients could bring down the financial markets of the world.

With it they could wreak havoc on the world’s money market.

The film stars the aforementioned Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Josh Hartnett, Cary Elwes, Bugzy Malone and Hugh Grant. 

It was originally going to be called Five Eyes, in reference to the real intelligence alliance of the same name.

The French military term “ruse de guerre,” has two meanings:

• the first is an act of military deception against one’s opponent
• the second emphasises acts against one’s opponent by creative, clever, unorthodox means, sometimes involving force multipliers or superior knowledge

The British government hires Nathan Jasmine to retrieve The Handle, who in turn coerces Fortune to return from vacation to head up a team made up of Sarah Fidel, JJ Davies and others.

The team travels to Madrid, seeking the courier intended to transport the hard drive containing the data that makes up The Handle.

Just as they take possession of the disk it is snatched by rival Mike Hook and his team, who it appears have also been hired to retrieve The Handle.

As luck would have it, Fidel, an American and a skilled hacker, manages to copy the hard drive’s contents seconds before they are forced to hand it over.

Learning that Simmonds plans to host a charity gala in Cannes, the team decides to infiltrate the event by blackmailing his favorite movie star, Danny Francesco, into helping them distract Simmonds.

There’s more, but in the end it’s a confusing mish-mash of plots and sub-plots and certainly not up to Richie’s usually high standard.

Statham is Statham and like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson he is always eminently watchable.

He and Ritchie have made five movies together over the years, but none has come close to the success they had with their original 1998 crime comedy Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

See also

Watch it

7 min read

Best of the westerns — our top picks

Interestingly, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerrefollowed the equally forgettable Wrath of Man, a film that did not receive a theatrical release, but went straight to Amazon Prime.

Apparently, Ritchie rewrote the script when he came on board, but actively encouraged the cast to improvise as much as possible.

Doesn’t sound like he was too interested. However, Aubrey Plaza was particularly pleased with this style of direction.

Hugh Grant is of course terrific as the laid-back super crook Simmonds and almost unrecognisable in the part.

You can catch Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre on Stan or Netflix.