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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is everything you want in a movie: the fight scenes are bloody and exciting, the dialogue is tongue-in-cheek, every joke landed, and not one actor felt out of place.

It’s a larger than life World War II thriller in the Guy Ritchie house style, and he strikes a fine, fun balance between the threat that the Nazis posed and the thrill of watching hunky heroes slaughter them at great length, then chuckle and smoke cigarettes and call each other 'old boy' about 50 million times.

For Ritchie, though, the stolidness is an experiment and, in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare at least, a reasonably effective one.

Though not Guy Ritchie's best film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare has enough slick style and exhilarating action to be a helluva fun ride.

These guys are so good at what they do, Ritchie fails to muster the expected tension. Instead of suspense, audiences feel a sense of delight in watching them succeed, no matter the setback.

As much as I’d love to see these characters in another film, I’d also love to have seen more of them in this one. Oh, and a quick general note to action directors everywhere: Silencers are great for stealth kills, but they really suck the fun out of a full-blown siege.

Chronicling a covert World War II mission manned by a band of renegades, the movie is diverting but remains awkwardly stuck between a larkish caper and a more gripping combat action thriller.

But when the smoke of its bombastic climax clears, what we're left with is an oddly sanitized, toned-down, and somewhat misshapen addition to Ritchie's oeuvre.

To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.

The result is a smirking, shallow action-comedy — a total mission failure.