.

There aren’t many directors in Hollywood that get to do exactly what they want; normally there’s pressure from the studio or something that has to be changed following test audience screenings. It is generally only prestige film makers like Spielberg, Campion, Lee or Tarantino that have this freedom and not even all the time. Them and it seems Guy Ritchie.

Once again we get something from Ritchie with the same ballsy disregard for acceptable use of language, cultural sensitivities, gender politics, believability and originality that we have come to expect, and is not likely to have been passed by any normal executive committee. This film, about an elite government funded spy organisation, is so cliched that it comes across as some kind of a jokeless satire of the many, many other movies with this same set up, and if anyone but Ritchie had pitched it I’m sure it would never have seen the light of day. Yet here we are with Miromax throwing money at it like they’ve found the a new Bourne franchise (you don’t give a film a subtitle if you aim for it to be a one off) and giving all unchallenged creative choices to the man who dubiously gifted the world his then wife Madonna in Swept Away.

To be fair when I say jokeless that does not mean humourless. The way Ritchie gets away it, more than ever in this movie but also in others such as The Gentlemen, The Man from UNCLE and both Sherlock Holmes, is by filling his cast full with great character performers and giving them a few decent scenes, if not a perfect plot, to shine in.

This is headed up here by Jason Statham, who along with Dwayne Johnson has the most stunningly skewed ratio of acting talent to screen presence (which is why Hobbs and Shaw is so glorious). It’s not that Statham can’t act, not at all, it’s just that he almost doesn’t need to. Jason Statham has done a number of movies with Guy Ritchie in the past but the director has never harnessed his true talent before precisely because he has previously tried to give him some dramatic challenges.

Starring with Statham is the brilliant Cary Elwes who again is doing what he does best; raising a resigned eyebrow, staying calm in the face of calamity and making dry comments in those delicious clipped English Man in Black tones. There is a moment here when the mission has gone south where Elwes simply says ‘oh poo’ which you don’t see enough of in action movies, but then I’m not sure anyone but Elwes could pull it off. Audrey Plaza is here having fun as the token female agent too and Josh Hartnett is brought in as a Hollywood actor who gets involved because of the bad guy’s passion for his films in a repeat of the conceit from An Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Apparently last to be cast was Hugh Grant as said arms dealer. This is a surprise though as the whole film is actually built around him. Having got a similarly quirky performance out of him in The Gentlemen, I’m sure Ritchie must at least have had him in mind from the start. Either way, he makes the movie and it is a thrill to see Grant having such fun in this later stage of his career now that he is no longer typecast by his youthful good looks.

Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre, or Operation Ritchie: Incroyable Carte Blanche as it might better be called, is not a great film. There is little sense of peril for any of the heroes and the narrative is interjected with odd little back and forth time jumps that don’t work as well as they should, but it is hard to be cross at it as it is all so undemandingly entertaining.