Review: Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre

It’s been a while since anyone went to the trouble of making a James Bond knockoff, but here comes Guy Ritchie to take a fresh whack at it. Back in the mid-1960s, after Goldfinger supercharged the nascent 007 franchise, the movie landscape swarmed with Bond rips. They ranged from kind-of-entertaining (James Coburn’s Our Man Flint) to fairly bearable (Dean Martin’s Matt Helm series) to altogether dire Euro spy junk (worst in show: Il vostro super agente Flit, an Italian knockoff of the Coburn knockoff). As lame as a lot of this stuff was, it all fed into the Austin Powers movies of the 1990s, which were fun, and then, a couple years ago, into the flamboyantly violent Kingsman pictures, about a secret spy agency headquartered inside a bespoke menswear shop on London’s Savile Row. The Kingsman movies demonstrated that the old pop-espionage world of the Bond films, however remote in time, was still resonant.

So the new Ritchie picture sounds promising at first. Whatever you think of his movies—the cockney gangster films he started out with, the Sherlock Holmes pictures with Robert Downey Jr., the Will Smith version of Aladdin (a billion-dollar hit at the world box office)—Ritchie’s work, however overamped, is seldom less than lively. But in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre he seems to take a wrong turn at every turn, starting with the constipated title. A ruse de guerre, for those who weren’t expecting a French quiz at the movies, would be a sneaky military strategy intended to deceive an enemy. As for the Operation Fortune part, that refers to the story’s protagonist, whose name is Fortune—Orson Fortune, I’m afraid.

Orson is played by Ritchie’s longtime collaborator, the stubbly butt-whomper Ja