'Operation Fortune: The Art of Winning' – another triumph for Guy Ritchie or a run-of-the-mill action movie with a star-studded cast?
The movie 'Operation Fortune: The Art of Winning' was supposed to hit worldwide theaters a year ago, and finally, after several postponements, the film has made it to global screens. And, which is especially nice, to ours as well. You can now see the latest work by the creator of cult films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla at absolutely any Russian cinema.
A character from a famous Soviet cartoon once said, 'Whatever you name the yacht, that's how it will sail.' It's unknown whether success awaits Guy Ritchie's new film with the flashy title 'Operation Fortune' in worldwide release, but domestic cinemas are already reporting significant box office earnings at pre-sale ticket levels. This is not surprising, given the Russian audience's immense love for the work of the famous British director and the almost complete absence of major foreign projects in the cinema release schedule after the departure of major studios from our market.
So what has Guy prepared for us this time?
An ideal Guy Ritchie film has always consisted of three constant components:
- an excellent cast, not necessarily consisting of A-list stars;
- a special vision and visual style of presenting the material on screen, which have become the director's trademark 'signature';
- a script with a fast-paced plot, snappy dialogue, and jokes from vivid, memorable characters.
If all three components are present, the result is an explosive mixture like 'Snatch' or. However, even if some of the above points are lost during the creation of the film due to, say, pressure from major studios, the result is still a high-quality, though perhaps more commercial product, like the glossy 'Sherlock Holmes' films or 'King Arthur: Legend of the Sword'.
To celebrate the film's release on streaming platforms, we've highlighted 5 reasons for you to watch it as soon as possible.
Open material
There have also been rather controversial projects in the director's uneven career, where the recipe for the gunpowder cocktail lost two ingredients at once – resulting in the bland love story with Madonna, 'Swept Away', which everyone has fortunately forgotten, and the pseudo-philosophical 'Revolver', which left fans of his early films in a stupor.
In 'Operation Fortune', there are no problems with the cast – it includes the director's favorite Jason Statham , the hot stuff Aubrey Plaza (who previously starred in 'Emily the Criminal', which received a lot of positive reviews at last year's Sundance), and Josh Hartnett , brought back from obscurity once again, who already acted alongside Statham in Ritchie's previous film , and as bright cherries on the cake in supporting roles we have Cary Elwes ('The Princess Bride', 'Saw') and Hugh Grant and Eddie Marsan , who have worked with the director before.
At the script level, problems begin with 'Operation Fortune'. Fans of the English director's work always expect from him a story with a huge number of plot lines cleverly intertwined, and behind each layer in the narrative there may be another additional layer, unexpectedly crashing down on the viewer somewhere in the finale.
In this film, you won't find anything like that – the plot is as straightforward as possible and barrels through the characters' dialogue and gritty action. The viewer expects a twist, an unexpected deviation of the plot, right up until the credits roll, but this does not happen.
The dialogue often lacks wit, many jokes are quite flat, and the successful ones can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Such a story could have been written by someone who wanted to be Guy Ritchie, but not by Guy Ritchie himself.
The situation could have been saved by the director's trademark visual style, but here too, 'Operation Fortune' did not offer us any particular refinements. There are only a couple of trademark techniques with choppy editing and flashbacks, when the film's creator seemingly remembered his name and what viewers expect from him.
In the end, we have yet another Jason Statham action movie, lightly seasoned with 'Guy Ritchie-isms', which would clearly have benefited from visual 'tricks' and well-written dialogue.
The plot about a group of operatives solving a global-scale problem and trying to outplay a team of competitors could well have been the basis for a sequel to 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.' if that had been given the green light. Two agents, a female spy assistant, and their prim British boss... Didn't Ritchie leave us with just such a company in the final frames of that 2015 film? And if the failure of 'U.N.C.L.E.' could be blamed on the studio, which didn't give the director full creative freedom, then he made 'Operation' on his own, and therefore, it's rather strange to see a mediocre film when your hands are completely untied.
However, this does not mean the film is bad. It's ordinary. You can spend a pleasant evening watching an entertaining action flick, and in the absence of any alternatives from the official foreign film market, such a release can even be considered a stroke of luck. Fortune, in other words.
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