Picture this:
You’re sitting at home at 8 o’clock on a Friday night. You’re too tired from the week to leave the house but you’re not ready to go to bed. Turning on the TV, you begin to scroll through Netflix, and a movie you’ve never seen before pops up. It has a number of actors that you know and love, and it promises both action and laughs. You hit play, and about two hours later, you think to yourself, “Well, that was a fun movie.” A year later, you’ll have forgotten all about it, but tonight, you don’t regret the time you spent watching it.
That is exactly the sort of movie that Guy Ritchie’s new spy/action comedy Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre turns out to be. While neither particularly groundbreaking nor overly memorable, it remains an entertaining enough watch.
I know that doesn’t exactly sound like an overly glowing review, but I really did enjoy going to see this in the theater. I know sometimes I sound like a paid advertiser for the AMC A-List movie theater subscription service (I promise, I’m not!), but because of that pass, I often decide to see movies on a whim that I might have otherwise waited to show up on streaming.
Operation Fortune is a light-hearted romp with Guy Ritchie’s signature flair about an over-the-top spy operation that sees Jason Statham teaming up with other beloved British actors and the always-delightful Aubrey Plaza.
This movie does have a few clever twists. Statham is sent to retrieve a stolen item of great danger to international security, but the catch is, the government doesn’t know exactly what project was stolen from this top secret compound. I also greatly enjoyed unlikely team member Danny Francesco, a somewhat clueless Hollywood actor who gets roped into the mission. Josh Hartnett seems to be having a grand time lampooning Hollywood action stars and their sizable egos, and he was one of my favorite parts of the movie.
I’m always a sucker for spy movies that jump to breathtaking locations around the globe, and I enjoyed the cinematography. The action was tense but not overly violent.
Like I said, there’s no need to rush to the theater to see this one, but if you like Jason Statham and/or Guy Ritchie, you could do worse with your Friday night than sitting down with a bucket of popcorn and watching this film.
