OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE (2023)

OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE (2023)

Tagline: Nope.

(Action, Comedy, AI is Going to Kill Us All) [R]

Celebrity Trojan horse. That's brilliant. It's classy.

One thing I noticed right away is that this is another one of those movies with kind of a linguistic combo meal going on. Ruse de guerre, literally means "war cunning" or "combat trickery", just in case you were wondering. I know I was. I took 1 semester of Spanish and forgot most of it, then one year of French and forgot most of it. I really wish I had stuck with at least one of them. I am actively trying to learn Chinese and Japanese at the moment. It’s going slowly. 

This storyline revolves around a spy named Orson Fortune who is stuck in his ways and likes things just so and claims he isn’t paid enough. He also isn’t afraid to sucker punch you in a pinch. However, Orson is going to need a team and one of his regulars is not available so we are introduced to Sarah, as a quick-witted super smart computer genius who can turn on and off the charm in a matter of seconds. We also get sharpshooter JJ whose skills and dedication are unparalleled this time around. The mission, oh don’t worry about it, they need to span the globe to save the world from an AI-generated nightmare. 

I think over time we are going to see a lot more stories about the dangers of AI, but these stories certainly are not new. Very recently I was in a webinar with one of the largest companies in the world presenting their AI software options and in that meeting, they essentially said they have already had to put a new program in place to prevent the AI from doing and saying shady things. The only way to keep up with a truly generative AI model is to write another model to babysit it and hope that one does not surpass the other in what it learns. So basically every time newer AI systems are running you are going to have another one or more in a head-to-head battle with it taking into account “billions” of parameters or variables if you will. So the fact that this movie hardly touches on the AI portion of things is a bit weird given the possibilities. 

Instead, this film focuses on humor. Some of this is expertly inserted by Aubrey Plaza (BLACK BEAR) who plays Sarah. What we don’t get is any character development or anything of any depth at all. Because of that, this whole movie comes across as something akin to what we got in RED NOTICE. Entertaining, but not mind-blowing, and because of that I can see why this movie didn’t get much attention when it was released. At the box office, this movie made over $12 million less than it cost to make. I am a fan of director Guy Ritchie but this movie didn’t feel like a Guy Ritchie movie to me cinematically. It is almost like he told everyone, let’s not do any fun camera tricks, let’s not do any interesting camera angles, just shoot this thing like an episode of the A-Team from the 80s. 

This thing does have enough clever lines to keep it interesting and I really liked the ending quite a bit. Jason Statham (THE MEG) shines in this as Orson Fortune and I really liked Cary Elwes (THE HYPERIONS) in this as Nathan. His role in this actually reminded me a lot of Professor Ruckus from THE HYPERIONS. Josh Hartnett is solid as Danny and I did like Bugzy Malone as JJ, but in this role, he was treated more like a background character which I think is just a result of poor writing. I wasn’t really that impressed with Hugh Grant (DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES) in this as Greg, but that is likely just because the character sucked. 

Overall, it would be overkill to say this is a bad movie, it’s not, it’s actually pretty fun, but don’t go into this expecting any deep philosophical change in your life to happen while the bullets are flying. 

This one gets a 4 out of 7. I would watch it again just for the leads, they are all did a great job. 

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