Fran Magazine: Issue #53

The Guy Ritchie: Ruse de Guerre issue

You’re reading Fran Magazine, a culture Substack by Fran Hoepfner. This issue is for free subscribers + civilians alike, but paid subscribers get access to more issues, including the new Sunday Dispatch.

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Fran Magazine news

Fran Magazine is celebrating the international holiday “Spring Break 🏝️” from March 10-18 and there will be no forthcoming Sunday Dispatch on Oscar Sunday nor a Wednesday issue. We will return with a DOUBLE Sunday Dispatch on March 19th.

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Fran Magazine: Ruse de Guerre

Happy International Women’s Day!! Are you all racing out of your homes to go see Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre? Are you spamming the Regal and AMC apps get to tickets for all of your friends to Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre? Are you making t-shirts that say “I LOVE ORSON FORTUNE, THE MAIN CHARACTER FROM OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE”? The Oscars are on Sunday — are you watching? I might be brave and skip them entirely — and the words on everyone’s lips are “Operation” and “Fortune” and who could forget “Ruse de Guerre”!

Obviously I am kidding: no one is talking about Guy Ritchie’s latest film Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. This is a fake movie! It hardly exists, minus the fact that it is currently in theaters after a tumultuous post-production headache that involved undoing the fact that the villains of the film were Ukrainian and instead making the villain of the film a guy named Mike (?).

credit: lionsgate

I am not quite sure why I still seek out Guy Ritchie films, let alone half-ass defend his dumbass choices. He has certainly not earned it! But there is an undeniable nostalgic quality to his work for me — I grew up with these movies, so to speak. My mom was the original fan in my life — singing the praises of Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels, and maybe also Snatch. I fondly recall getting RocknRolla (a good movie!) out from the public library on DVD and watching it over and over again. Some of this, no doubt, can be blamed on a latent childhood anglophilia, but mostly it’s that these movies felt genuinely cool.

The Ritchie geezer flicks gave way to the Ritchie Hollywood era which stretched the length of my twenties almost exactly. His original Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law (<3) is an incredibly average work of filmmaking, full of all the signs of recent, noted decay: overlong, miserable color scheme, “epic” sense of humor, but in 2009 it’s much easier to be forgiving of that kind of thing. I recall that score being one of my particular favorite Hans Zimmer (and Lorne Balfe) outings, but it’s hard not to listen to it now and consider it straight up steampunk aspirant.

Sherlock Holmes gives way to Sherlock Holmes 2: a movie I saw and have truly no memory of. They replaced Rachel McAdams with Noomi Rapace? That has nothing to do with me. But the two Hollywood Guy Ritchie films that follow are uniquely excellent in the context of Ritchie’s moviemaking, by which I mean totally average in the grand scheme of things. But his Man from U.N.C.L.E. and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword… man, at least those are movies! The Man from UNCLE (sorry — I am only going to do the punctuation once, I have only so many hours of the day) feels like a Tumblr movie that came in a post-Tumblr era, with Henry Cavill playing American (sure), Armie Hammer playing Russian (he’s great, sorry!), Alicia Vikander post-Oscar win playing… idk, a woman who short (I relate!) and Elizabeth Debicki playing tall (she can only do this, for better and worse). Ritchie’s adaptation seems to have genuine affection for both the original Man from UNCLE as well as the characters in this new one. Most importantly, however, these characters do feel legitimately cool, which basically all of his later work is missing. My friend Nick often refers to Michael Mann protagonists as “bozos who kind of own” — case(s) in point, Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat, Ansel Elgort (sorry) in Tokyo Vice. In a perfect world, this is also the deal with the Guy Ritchie protagonists, except obviously slightly if not quite worse.

After Man from UNCLE, Ritchie returns to IP with his adaptation of King Arthur called, obviously, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Starring “the Henry Cavill for intellectuals” Charlie Hunnam and WHO ELSE BUT JUDE LAW, Ritchie’s sword and magic movie has everything you could want from Djimon Hounsou as Merlin to a David Beckham cameo (???). I have grown somewhat weary of the tedious gunplay of the John Wick franchise, and I halfway believe that could make another three King Arthur: Legend of the Swords for less money, all considered, with a lot less blood. This movie… it’s entirely mediocre but it also totally works. Charlie Hunnam is sort of the ideal Guy Ritchie lead: remember how he dropped out of Fifty Shades of Grey because he was “too germophobic” to shoot sex scenes? Exactly. Guy Ritchie leads are cool (buff, tough, etc.) but they are NOT fucking, which is sort of the essential key here. These are cool guys on only their own terms. Women like them, sure, but it’s like, it’s too gay to make time for a woman. There are other guys who beat up, maybe even a giant snake.

After King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Ritchie makes his version of Aladdin. The less that is said about this film, the better. I will, however, point you in the direction of this thread¹:

tomie soprano @jon_snow_420

freeze frame on man running through bazaar Jason Statham (VO): yeah. thass me. aladdin runnin frum the fuckin fuzz again

And, of course, for those whose concept of “Will Smith” fell to grace after the Oscars last year, let’s not forget this crime against humanity:

I watched most of this movie on a plane and will still never get this time back for myself, but that’s the burden I carry being the editor-in-chief of Fran Magazine.

The disastrous bomb that was live action Aladdin takes us into Ritchie’s most recent era, his “return to form” with The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, and now Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Admittedly, I haven’t seen what seems to be the one good one here — Wrath of Man — but I have seen The Gentlemen² and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.

The Gentlemen — where to begin? There’s almost too much going on here to get to the root of the problem, which is that the movie is not only terrible — overlong, stupidly convoluted, at least half of the guys in here are straight up bad — but also racist, homophobic, and extremely anti-Semitic. Obviously I am not writing this thinking, “One thing Guy Ritchie has always nailed is race,” but if you think back to the Benicio del Toro Jewish character in Snatch and then see the Jeremy Strong (!!!!!!!!!!! gulag) character in The Gentlemen, there’s a direct plummet straight into the ocean.

There are two interwoven storylines in The Gentlemen: one where Charlie Hunnam and Hugh Grant discuss the events of the movie, and one where Charlie Hunnam is directly involved in the events of the movie. The former is largely function, often funny, relatively homoerotic. I really like what Hugh Grant is doing in these later Guy Ritchie films — Ruse de Guerre included — and wish Ritchie had the wherewithal to make that more of the film. The events of The Gentlemen are difficult to recall with any coherency: Matthew McConaughey is a crime boss, representative of some old world dominion (to me, perhaps, representing Ritchie himself) feeling threatened by a new class of criminals played by hunk du jour Henry Golding, to whom the movie is relentlessly racist towards, and Jeremy Strong, playing GAY and JEWISH in the worst fashion imaginable, it’s hard not to imagine he did Armageddon Time as pure penance.³ There is a stupid subplot involving Colin Farrell as a boxing coach wearing a tartan tracksuit that is, bare minimum, loosely heartwarming. Mostly it's offensive, and even worse, none of these guys are cool. And this is a movie that's begging to be seen as cool. As Phil so aptly articulated last night: “The poster is a glass of scotch with an ice cube shaped like a GUN.” Come on!!! Anyway, here's what someone said to me on Letterboxd when I called it offensive, not even aware of the fact that I would three years later articulate much of the same points. I remember I once called myself a "populist hack" to a critic friend and they were like, "aw... I wouldn't say hack!"

Which brings us to the disastrous and oft-delayed Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. I think I first saw a trailer for this film a whole-ass two years ago, and then was baffled when it seemingly never came out. I heard the Ukraine rumor, and having seen a movie with unnamed, vague “Eastern enemies” (Top Gun: Maverick), I guess it makes sense that they would want to go back and fix that. They did not, however, make time to fix the fact that the fat Hollywood producer character is named “Saul Goldstein” or a number of other racist elements to the film, but hey, only so many hours in the day, or whatever!!!

Like The Gentlemen, there is a somewhat-meta Hollywood fixation in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (I am determined to type this out in full as many times as possible), in which a team of ops lead by Jason Statham’s “Orson Fortune” has to infiltrate and stop a black market deal from going down. To do this, they hire a pretty boy, stunt-focused actor named Danny Francesco played by Josh Hartnett. Broadly speaking, I like that Ritchie is pulling on these older Hollywood guys — Hartnett, yes, but Cary Elwes is in here, along with Hugh Grant, basically doing the same (effective) thing he was doing in The Gentlemen. There’s a girl, obviously, played by Aubrey Plaza, who Statham’s Orson Fortune doesn’t like, but does a little — do they have sexual tension? No? But the movie wants you to think they might? Or not? There’s also a bright upstart named JJ played by rapper Bugzy Malone, maybe the only guy to escape this movie actually looking cool.

This is the underlying issue, perhaps, with both The Gentlemen and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre: these movies are not cool! At least with these cast-heavy action flicks of highly dubious sociopolitics, there is a guy who is being cool. He’s kicking guys in the face, maybe, or doing a crazy thing with a gun, or maybe he always has something funny to say. I don’t know, I’m not the filmmaker Guy Ritchie. But the guys in all of these movies are so lame! Statham, a performer I really do like, behaves as though he’s had the wind knocked out of him, and this is not an “aging hitman” kind of flick. This is arguably a character who is in his prime, largely non-verbal and oft-cast aside to just hit random bodyguards. Statham is objective at least a little cool: you have to work actively hard to make him uncool. The movie bends over backwards to make the case that he is an expensive guy for the British government to employ because he is obsessed with wine. Johnny Depp much? But a wine interest does not make a guy cool, and they don’t even dig into the wine fanaticism in an interesting way. Like, at least have Orson Fortune show up drunk? At least with the past Ritchie films, full of their own “not aging well” flaws, there was an underlying edge or coolness that made you actually have to reckon with whether the ends justify the means. Here, it’s like, why are any of us doing this? Don’t tell us Statham’s Orson Fortune — his name is Orson Fortune — is cool. Show us him doing something sick. He does nothing sick!!! At least, Josh Hartnett comes out looking okay.

I am not sure why and how I continue to trick myself into seeing Guy Ritchie films in theaters, what precisely I hope to get out of them. The Gentlemen, in particular, had an air of post-Brexit certainty, a “you know what, maybe it is better off if it’s just white guys running the show,” that was tedious to swallow, as a giant ice cube shaped like a gun would be. I have been fooled too many times over — I watched Aladdin on a plane! I bristle at the lore-dense IP-thirst of John Wick, but mostly Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre made me nostalgic for AmbuLAnce, an equally conservative piece of filmmaking with a half-assed grad school subplot, homoeroticism, drones, and a dog.

1. This thread predicting Aubrey Plaza as Jasmine did, I think, contribute to Aubrey Plaza in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.

2. Twice, unfortunately, because I was so high on edibles the first time I thought I made half of it up.

3. Real Jeremy Strong New Yorker profile heads will remember that whatever Strong said about The Gentleman was off the record :(