For a large number of years now I’ve had an affinity for the films of Guy Ritchie. His English gangster films are the most intriguing with clever plots and hard-nosed dialogue written in a style that is amusing enough to keep me entertained even when I’m not quite familiar with the British vernacular. I’ve even enjoyed his Sherlock Holmes movies and the remake of Aladdin. In the last few years however his output has been a little less consistent. I was not a big fan of “Operation Fortune”, and I had my suspicions about this film, given its apparently turbulent distribution problems. (Although Guy Richie’s The Covenant” was my favorite film two years ago)
I can say off the bat that this is not my favorite of his films but it is also not the worst of those movies that he’s made. The major flaw in this film is the first 45 minutes, where we get the kind of narrative provided in voiceover that tells you that this might have been an intriguing novel but was maybe a little too intricate to show cinematically. Usually Richie gets around that by narrating things that have already happened and then going back and showing us what it all meant. The structure of this film’s narration however seems to be contiguous with the events that are taking place. So we get an omnipresent voice explaining what’s happening on the screen, almost continuously for the first half of the film. I found it quite irritating. Yeah it helps clear up what’s going on on screen, but it was pissing me off having to listen to this voice keep telling me what should be clear from watching the events on screen. The narration is needed to clarify things but it just doesn’t work the way it has worked in previous Richie films.
Now that said, once the action part of the movie kicks into gear, the film works really well. We have a very clear idea of what’s coming because elaborate plans were laid out in the first half of the film. Richie has always played with the timeline of his plots, but this film seems to have done the most surprising of things, stuck to a chronological narrative, and followed through on things that were set up in the first half of the film.
The two biggest stars in the movie are Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal, both of whom usually have enough charisma to carry a film on their own. The problem with this movie is that they are not really the stars of the film, they’re the secondary characters who carry out the plans of the main lead. Eiza González plays a high powered Financial fixer/lawyer who’s trying to reclaim a billion dollar loan given to a shady South American who is either a drug lord or a dictator, we don’t really know for sure. All we know is that he is scurrilously unwilling to pay back his debt, and has already killed people in the process of protecting himself. Most of the film consists of a high stakes set of financial traps, being perpetrated by González’s character with the assistance of Cavill and Gyllenhaal. They seem to be equally ruthless, but we are clearly on their side from the beginning. Rosamund Pike appears as the financier, who contracts with González s character, but who may be trying to short her in the payoff.
Sid and Bronco are the two tough guys played by Cavill and Gyllenhaal, and their loyalty to González is explained partially on screen, but mostly it’s assumed because of the way the dialogue flows. I don’t want to seem sexist , but I think it may be possible that another one of the faults of the film is that it puts so much of Richie’s Macho based banter into the mouth of the main female character. Rachel, the character played by González, is supposed to be incredibly bright, accomplished and ruthless. All of that comes out in her demeanor, but when the dialogue tries to reinforce it, it doesn’t quite sound as true. Jason Statham, Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant and a dozen other British actors have made Richie’s dialogue crackle over the years, González just makes it sound like exotic conversation, not like petulant threats or braggadocious chastisements. To me the thing that doesn’t work in this film is using her point of view to tell the story.
We know how well prepared the team is to carry out their plan when they originally visit the island of their nefarious counterpart. We were shown step by step the plans that were being made to protect Rachel and to extract themselves from anything that might have gone wrong. When Rachel and her team accomplished their objective, you might think that all of that setup was for naught. Of course it’s there for a reason. Eventually all of the three Escape Routes that were elaborately laid out for us , get used in some way because of the usual last minute double cross.
Bronco and Sid are the stereotypically competent to the extreme accessories to what would be a heist film, if the main objective here wasn’t just blackmail in Leverage. Once the chase starts everyone is cool, calm and deliberate. Even when a sacrifice is being made, it is done in a very professional way, reinforcing the old saying it’s not personal it’s just business.
I never saw much marketing on this film and I’m not exactly sure how they would sell it anyway. The heist is not really a heist but more a series of stings designed to create leverage to get somebody in a contract to comply with the terms of their loan. I suppose they could lean heavily on the action scenes and half of the film, but it takes a while to get there and the humor that is usually strung throughout a Guy Richie film seems to be much less frequent than usual. Cool shots of the composed team are all we have to keep us going until the guns start coming out.
Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the film, I just found it to be less of what I wanted and more of something else . There were probably ways to fix this movie, so that it would more closely resemble some of the earlier gangster films that Richie is responsible for, it just seems like everybody was a little lazy and wanted to do it in shorthand. And then they realize that nobody reads shorthand.
Kirkham A Movie A Day 