Courtesy See-Saw Films
Like someone with a shopping addiction who knows they’re suffering but insists they don’t need help, Netflix seemingly cannot stop pumping out subpar and expensive-looking World War II spy thrillers. They’re flashy, the planes go whoosh and the jazz scores are brassy. But, like Netflix’s Munich—The Edge of War, these films are often tensionless affairs. We see the climax coming, even if one can argue we all know who won the war. A skilled team can make such tales work, but they maybe weren’t available this time. No, this is spoiled meat.
Find here Operation Mincemeat from Shakespeare in Love director John Madden. We follow Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), a pair of British officers charged with passing off a dead body as a British soldier and dumping it in Spain with fake intel in attempts to feed false plans to the Nazis. For it to be passable, however, our leads must fabricate an entire fake life for the corpse in case any fascists come sniffing around trying to authenticate anything. It’s complicated and weird, and it’s a very real thing that happened during WWII—successfully, no less, leading to the 1943 invasion of Sicily.
That bit is fascinating, but it seems Madden is so concerned about the whole British-dudes-in-meetings thing being boring that we’re cursed with a love triangle between our heroes and Kelly McDonald (Boardwalk Empire) that feels so out of place you’ll beg the British to clean house. On top of that, pedantic dialogue repeatedly and eagerly reminds us of the looming Nazi threat, as if that weren’t otherwise clear in a movie about WWII.
“Is everything going according to plan?” someone asks.
“THE NAZIS WILL STOP AT NOTHING,” someone else responds, panic-stricken.
This is, of course, rather annoying, and a glaring waste of dialogue. Even worse, Italy’s got big stakes in this plot, as they did historically, so it’s curious that not a single Italian character appears on screen. Breaking from the borderline tired Britain-v-Germany trope would’ve been nice, too, yet Operation Mincemeat refuses to be bold. Boldness just isn’t in its DNA. Performance-wise, almost all is well, though Firth’s inability to express any emotion on his face seems a cause for future concern. Somewhere in there, you’ll even glimpse Jason Isaacs (Draco Malfoy’s dad), and though Madden’s direction is solid enough, he burdens the script with what feels like a distrustful aura.
A common flaw these historical films share is the over-emphasis on factoids, or, perhaps, the belief an audience cannot grasp the depths of research involved. We can appreciate research without moments that remind us about it, and that’s not to say Mincemeat is terrible, maybe you’ll just get more from the actual event’s Wikipedia article.
6
+Energetic; decent for history nerds
-Terrible dialogue; dull melodrama
Operation Mincemeat
Directed by Madden
With Firth, Macfadyen, Macdonald and Jason Isaacs
Netflix, NR, 128 minutes
