The most prominent thing I noticed about "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre," the latest from Guy Ritchie, is how bright it all is. Movies have become so increasingly underlit and dark that the sunny brightness of "Operation Fortune" is almost startling. In fact, the movie might be too bright — the sun seems to always be shining no matter where the characters are. And when the scene happens to be taking place at night, we can actually see what's happening on the screen. It's a movie miracle! Whatever flaws are inherent to "Operation Fortune" (I'm not using that full title over and over again — sorry), Ritchie, cinematographer Alan Stewart, and the rest of the filmmaking team deserve kudos for remembering to light the damn movie. 

Lighting aside, "Operation Fortune" has had a bumpy road to the screen. The pic was originally supposed to bow in January 2022, then got bumped to March 2022, then got pulled from the release schedule entirely. The reason? The filmmakers had the bad luck of having a trio of villains who just happened to be Ukrainian just as the still-ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War began. The producers, reportedly and understandably, felt it was bad taste to have Ukrainian bad guys at the time, and the film was pulled. Now, even though the war continues, "Operation Fortune" is finally seeing the light of day, perhaps with a few trims here and there (the nationality of the bad guys is never overtly underlined in the version I watched). 

The end result is a bright, sunny, occasionally funny spy movie with a few ultra-stylish action scenes. The film is also frequently shapeless and somewhat stiff — the humor is never as successful as intended, and the characters feel flat, despite being played by talented folks. The only bright spot, performance-wise, comes from Hugh Grant, who is clearly having a great time playing a sleazy arms dealer. The arms dealer is mixed up in trying to help sell a recently stolen, ultra-mysterious device known as the Handle. We eventually find out what this is and what it does, but it doesn't really matter — it's just a MacGuffin to get the story in motion.

The Handle

After the Handle is snatched, the British government calls in fussy handler Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes) to assemble a team of contract spies to save the day. The leader of the team is Orson Fortune, played by Jason Statham doing his Jason Statham thing. I like Statham. I like watching him punch people. But I don't know if anyone would accuse him of having a lot of range, and here he's playing more or less the same character he always plays. There are some rather weak bits to try to expand his character, such as the way he exploits the budgets of his employers to buy himself fancy things like wine and holidays, but that all feels like an afterthought.

Also on the team: tech expert Sarah (Aubrey Plaza), the multi-talented J.J. (Bugzy Malone), and a few other characters who feel completely extemporaneous, so much so that they pretty much vanish from the movie after being introduced. We're told Orson Fortune is the best at what he does, but this won't be an easy job — there's an alternate team of spies also trying to retrieve the Handle, and they're not afraid to play dirty.

Fortune's team learns that Grant's arm's dealer, an obscenely wealthy creep named Greg Simmonds, is involved in trying to sell the Handle. They also learn that Simmonds is obsessed with a movie star named Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett). And so a plan is formed: they'll recruit (well, really, blackmail) Danny into helping them get close to Simmonds. The idea of an actor being forced into the world of espionage could be fun, but it comes across as an afterthought here. There are long stretches where Danny completely disappears from the story, and it's pretty clear that — Hartnett's solid performance aside — he could be cut entirely from the film and it wouldn't change anything. It feels lazy and undercooked, and one imagines that an early draft of the script was more devoted to this angle before Ritchie came in and changed things up. I found it nearly impossible to get invested in any of the characters; not even the usually dependable Aubrey Plaza can make this weak script work in her favor. 

Stylish Action

What "Operation Fortune" lacks in other departments it makes up for with some admittedly stellar action sequences. Ritchie gets stylish here, staging gunfights in total silence and making us think one set of events happened before doubling back to show how things really went down. These bursts of creative action are like whiffs of strong coffee to wake us from the slumber induced by most of the rest of the film. The action and the scenes with Grant's sleazeball arms dealer are the only situations where "Operation Fortune" feels genuinely alive and not like a collection of tired jokes and so-so set pieces.

And yet I keep coming back to the brightness. "Operation Fortune" is so well-lit, so sunny, so visually clear that it starts to feel like a SAD lamp being used to treat seasonal affective disorder. This isn't a very good movie, but gosh it was nice to watch something where I could actually see what the hell was happening up on the screen.

/Film Rating: 5 out of 10

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