If you’re reading this after the fact, I will not blame you for falling for the bait and switch The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare pulled on you, er, us. It’s a classic move to get audiences into theaters, buying as many tickets as possible based solely on the marketing materials and familiarity with the cast than anything else. To their credit, the team behind this new Guy Ritchie film sure gave it their all to convince us this film, a true story even, was a bright, bold, rollicking action flick to rival Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Oscar-winning Inglorious Basterds. The bullets were flying, wild faces on actors like Henry Cavill hinted of ribald humor, Alan Ritchson’s muscles were appropriately bulging, and they even threw in Eiza González letting ‘er rip with a machine gun to indicate women were kicking butt despite the gender-specific title.

Alas, all we saw leading up to its release was merely well-edited material that made The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare only look like loads of fun. Instead, it’s a dusty relic of tedium that slowly drowns in the water-logged trenches of its mediocrity. The more it attempts to draw parallels with Tarantino’s brilliant film (and several of its performances), the further it falters, missing the mark entirely on humor and coming up short on poignancy as a retelling of a commendable mission only recently discovered through declassified documents.

Based on Damien Lewis’s 2014 novel Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII, it traces a mission authorized by Winston Churchill (played by Skyfall’s Rory Kinnear, looking more like a kneecap with tiny eyeballs than Churchill) to sink a Nazi ship anchored in the Canary Islands loaded with supplies for German U-Boats.  Without these ships, the naval submarines of the Third Reich couldn’t operate, allowing the once dangerous shipping routes in the Atlantic to resume their wartime efforts.

Dubbed Operation Postmaster, the objective was so covert that in true Mission: Impossible style, only select members within Churchill’s secretive Special Operations Executive (SOE) knew the plan and players. These include a young Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox, Victor Frankenstein) and his superior, M (Cary Elwes, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One), and it won’t come as any surprise that the closing credits mention how Fleming drew on his time in the SOE when creating the world of James Bond. Should any of those involved in Operation Postmaster be caught, they would be subject to whatever punishment fit their crimes. The right group had to be assembled and, as sketched in greasy smudged crayon by Ritchie and his three co-screenwriters (Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel), they were a motley bunch of misfits more defined by their skills or accents than their personalities.

Big-chested, bushy-faced, and straight out of a vintage comic book, Cavill (Enola Holmes) fits the frame of a slippery leader of the troupe of trouble. While he eventually fades into the background like everyone else (primarily due to He’s Out There’s Ed Wild’s murky cinematography), he fares better here as stalwart Gus March-Phillipps than in February’s dreadful Argylle. Though his absurdly muscled proportions give off a de-greened Hulk visage, Alan Ritchson’s (Ordinary Angels) arrow-slinging Anders Lassen lends new meaning to the term Great Dane. There’s more than a whiff of homoeroticism from Lassen directed toward Henry Golding’s (Crazy Rich Asians) bomb specialist Freddy Alvarez, a strange bit of bro-ness which, if it wasn’t willing to go all the way, is superfluous. Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike) and Hero Fiennes Tiffin (The Silencing) complete the crew, but I couldn’t tell you what they brought to the table other than heat-seeking smolder.

March-Phillipps is brought on board from prison and quickly gathers his team to make the ocean voyage to the ship. At the same time, undercover agents Marjorie Stewart (González, I Care a Lot) and Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, Dune) continue their work on the ground near the harbor destination in Fernando Po. Mr. Heron runs several nightclubs frequented by German soldiers and military leaders, and Marjorie is the new entertainment in town, meant to catch the eye of the powerful Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger, Atomic Blonde). As both teams work toward a shared goal, it’s a race to scuttle the ship before it can get back to sea, avoiding capture by the German armies and their own forces along the way.

With its multitude of characters and intersecting storylines, there’s a lot of ground to cover in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which should equal a narrative that engages and entertains. Unfortunately, Ritchie and Co’s dialogue is utterly foolish to the point of Mel Brooks-level parody. It is filled with historical inconsistencies, eventually buckling under the weight of its ensemble and meandering labyrinthine plot. I kept waiting for something to appear on screen that would be interesting enough to care about, but it’s a soggy matchstick of a film. No spark whatsoever.

Not to go back again to the Tarantino film (which, ironically, Schweiger also appeared in and at times is found guilty of trying to emulate Christoph Waltz), but because it’s so clear from the start that The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is going after the same audience, you must wonder how anyone thought they could match or surpass that movie without putting any effort in? It wants to borrow the vibe but not get into the groove. There’s no clever dialogue to be had (brace yourself for González & Schweiger trading moronic riddles like they are Shakespeare sonnets), and it lacks a subtle touch in balancing extreme violence with biting humor, not that it lands any of the jokes it lobs overboard.

Despite delivering a terrific picture in 2023 with The Covenant, Ritchie’s trademark style and vibrant palette are absent, adding to the overall drab feeling. Though he is becoming prolific in his output, I wouldn’t award him any service medal for performance just yet. Plenty of directors out there manage to knock out several movies in a year, but that doesn’t mean they are all worth your time. The final third of the film is set at night and becomes an assortment of scenarios of people shooting one another, hardly anything to get excited about creatively. The enemies are so featureless, and the killing so unimportant that the filmmakers could have had the same three extras dressed up in different outfits and killed them a hundred times on screen, and no one would have noticed.

What looks like a dynamic adventure bursting with energy is a dull, talky slog lacking the nerve to retread history with vigor. Showing an almost mechanical detachment from its material and, eventually, its audience, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is set to be a major disappointment to fans of Ritchie and well-crafted war films. Boasting a usually likable and highly watchable cast of beautiful people, it’s a film that marches to the beat of its own yawn.