Guy Ritchie made a cover version of a movie

It's better than you'd think, but like all Guy Ritchie projects, it would be better if he wasn't doing something very specific.

You may have heard there was a movie that came out this year called The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, starring Henry Cavill and the absolutely enormous motherfucker who plays Reacher on Reacher and fired a rocket launcher in Fast & Furious X and is generally being Enormous White Motherfucker Who Isn’t John Cena in every project that needs an Enormous Motherfucker. (Which, let’s be clear: every project improves with the addition of one Enormous Motherfucker or another. Yes; every project. You name a movie or TV show that wouldn’t be made better with the inclusion of a dude so large that you go JESUS fucking CHRIST the first time he pops up onscreen. See? It can’t be done.)

That movie is now on Starz, which is always a hilarious thing to say, but if you’re like me, you may have signed up for three months of Starz via Amazon Prime because the first week is free and then the first two months after that are only $2.99 and maybe you and your wife want to watch the 2005 Pride & Prejudice movie again but somehow the only service it’s on is Starz, even though you both could have sworn you recently bought the DVD, because buying physical media is now the only foolproof way to be able to watch something you want to watch, because if you’re not careful every platform will fuck around and play hot potato with streaming rights until all of a sudden you’re staring down the barrel of a Starz subscription.

We’ve all been there, right?

The marketing for the film made it seem like it would be a not-very-serious and wacky romp of a World War II film, and although the knee-jerk reaction to that probably should be "Oh, like Inglourious Basterds,” it isn’t something that I particularly thought the movie would be. The opening scene of this loosely-based-on-a-real-British-WWII-mission flick has some Nazis coming aboard a boat where the Enormous Motherfucker and Henry Cavill appear to be posing as a gay Swedish couple (which rules, obviously), and the Nazi commander is a little sniveling worm of a man, who makes threats while his men search below decks for more crew. In some ways, it apes the opening Hans Landa farmhouse scene from Basterds, but the Nazi commander isn’t really like Landa, and the tone isn’t really like Quentin Tarantino’s opus.

And then you get to the 4:15 mark of the below scene.

The score. The title card with modernist/grindhouse-era font over a freeze frame. The brutality and glee of the violence. The instant that score kicked in, I thought, “This didn’t have to lean quite so hard into the Basterds aesthetic.” If I knew that this was a Guy Ritchie movie, I had forgotten about it until the end credits, when his name came up. And my immediate thought upon seeing his name was both “Oh, that explains it” and “Well, that’s odd.”

Guy Ritchie making this movie makes a lot of sense because it’s very stylized and goofy throughout, with a lot of Very British people being deadpan about violence. Ritchie made his name on his flash, which he leaned into too hard when he was lost in the Madonna wilderness for a decade and became the punchline to a joke that he created for himself. The Sherlock Holmes franchise brought him back to relevance, and I can’t help but think that the best thing that ever happened to Guy Ritchie’s career was the advent of Zack Snyder. Ritchie was, for all of the aughts, the go-to pull when people wanted to cite a film’s style over substance. Now (and for the foreseeable future) it’s going to be Snyder.

Since the second Holmes film, Ritchie keeps plugging along, mostly keeping his head down and maintaining a very impressive pace for a guy who gets a massive budget every few years. For every flop (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), he makes a critical and cult favorite starring an attempted cannibal (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), or a massive blockbuster no one remembers (Aladdin), or an unexpected franchise starter (The Gentlemen), or some movies you have absolutely never heard of (Operation Fortune, Wrath of Man, the bafflingly titled Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant).

This is far from the only period piece Ritchie has done, but it is his first WWII movie, and in that respect it both makes sense that he’d go the Basterds route and makes no sense that he would so explicitly ape the aesthetic and tone of arguably Tarantino’s most iconic and beloved film, when he’s been working to shed the “Tarantino acolyte” label since his debut film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, bowed in 1998.

Maybe it never bothered him all that much to be branded “British Tarantino” when Lock Stock and Snatch became mandatory purchases for the adult white bro DVD shelf, canonized by Aspirational Film School Guys alongside Fight Club, Shawshank, and the more regrettable college gospels like Scarface and Boondock Saints. He never really went searching for a “legitimate” style of filmmaking, even when he was lost in the doldrums of Swept Away and Rocknrolla. Sam Raimi got so in his head about the critical slams regarding his bag of tricks that he made A Simple Plan partly as a dare to himself that he could make a “straight” film with none of the moving-camera tricks that his more fervent critics claimed were either a crutch or a gimmick. Ritchie has never done that. The Holmes movies weren’t him shaping up and playing by the rules; they’re just proof of concept for the thought experiment “what if Guy Ritchie had a $100 million budget instead of a $10 million budget?” (Rocknrolla making $25 million on an $18 million budget and then Sherlock Holmes making $524 million on a $90 million budget has got to be one of the craziest year-to-year turnarounds ever.)

But it’s still jarring to see a movie that, in so many ways, not only evokes Inglourious Basterds, but quite often feels like it’s daring you not to think about it. There have been plenty of shot-for-shot remakes before, but this feels like the closest someone has come to doing a cover version of a movie. Tonally and spiritually, it’s closest to when a pop punk band does a cover of a standard three-quarters of the way through an album, or when they don’t have a leftover original for a soundtrack album. It’s Less Than Jake doing “I Think I Love You” on the Scream 2 soundtrack.

It’s a fun movie, even if there’s too much unnecessary Winston Churchill intrigue in a storyline that feels entirely like padding. (And kudos to the casting department for finding the only onscreen Winston Churchill who bears absolutely no resemblance to the Prime Minister who has been portrayed by everyone from John Lithgow to Richard Burton.) I laughed a lot, and I had a good time watching it, but every time there was a fake Sergio Leone needle drop (and there were many), I couldn’t help but think the movie should be better than that. That it is better than that.

Maybe Ritchie and his team felt it was just too close in tone and content to Basterds, so they may as well tip the cap. Maybe he just intended from the beginning to make HIS Basterds. And maybe the movie wouldn’t have been as fun or worked as well as it did without paying tribute, in its way. But we’ll never know. Basterds, Django Unchained and Kill Bill are the Tarantino movies most steeped in pastiche — Tarantino pulling from all of his favorite cinematic themes to create an amalgam. But now we’ve entered a second layer of reflexivity: a pastiche of a pastiche. Swiping from Basterds means you’re swiping the product of a sum of parts in service of paying tribute to the end result of what Tarantino was attempting to pay tribute to in the first place.

That’s how all of pop culture works, of course. Elvis took from all the black music he liked, and then all of rock ‘n’ roll took from the end product that was cobbled together from that, for example. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare mostly works, which is because it mostly works on its merits alone. Ritchie makes films at such a rapid clip (he already has two more films in post-production) that he can afford to make a cover version of a WWII movie.

None of this changes the fact that we’re still waiting for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. 2. I’m sure Armie Hammer could use the money.