The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is like an origin story for Guy Ritchie’s whole thing

polygon.com:

British movie director Guy Ritchie loves nothing more than the collision of class and thuggery. It’s like catnip to him. In movies like Snatch and 2019’s The Gentlemen, he thrives on putting plummy toffs next to venal crims and seeing what happens — or combining the two. This is the director who turned Sherlock Holmes into a pugilist, after all. His idea of Englishness encompasses the wood-paneled manor and the stinking fish market, but nothing in between. His idea of masculinity is Vinnie Jones, the foul-mouthed, brutal Cockney soccer player, but dressed like a country squire, with a hunting shotgun in the crook of his arm.

Ritchie has actually made all kinds of movies in all kinds of modes, from the rom-com Swept Away to Disney’s live-action Aladdin remake. But he remains defined by the tone he set in his first two films, 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch — laddish crime capers that at the time felt like a Britpop answer to Quentin Tarantino. These movies pinned down a regional genre that Ritchie’s former collaborator Matthew Vaughn later supercharged into something more stylized and ironized, especially in the cartoonish, James Bond-baiting Kingsman series of spy flicks.

Because Ritchie’s early movies loom so large, and because his legacy and Vaughn’s have been so muddled together, it’s natural to expect Ritchie’s World War II film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to play in similarly over-the-top fashion, like a mix of Kingsman and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. The title and trailer of the movie, which is now available on DVD, 4K UHD, and on demand, seem to suggest that, too.

But Ritchie isn’t that kind of director anymore, if he ever was. In the last few years, he’s reined in his stylistic flourishes, dialed down his budgets, and settled into a comfortable rhythm as a fast-moving genre workhorse, cranking out well-crafted, efficient, unvarnished films at a pace that should impress even Steven Soderbergh. Ungentlemanly Warfare