Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre is not just an underrated Jason Statham movie; it’s an underrated movie period. The fifth collaboration between Jason Statham and director Guy Ritchie, Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, premiered in January 2023 in theaters before moving to streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Despite those two names attached, along with Operation Fortune‘s impressive ensemble cast, which includes Aubrey Plaza, Cary Elwes, Hugh Grant, Josh Hartnett, and Bugzy Malone, this may be the first time you’ve heard of the movie. That’s a bummer, because it deserves much more than the lukewarm reception it received.

Guy Ritchie’s 13th feature-length movie, Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, follows Orson Fortune (Statham), an international spy who is hired by the British government to retrieve a device known as “The Handle,” theoretically worth billions. Orson forms a team of agents to get “The Handle” but along the way runs into Greg Simmonds (Grant), an arms dealer looking to acquire The Handle and sell it to the highest bidder. It may have a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes and only earned $48.9 million at the box office (via BoxOfficeMojo), but that vastly underestimates its enjoyability.

Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre Deserved More Love

Everyone Is Having A Ball In Guy Ritchie’s Movie

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre deserved a lot more fanfare than it received and those low Rotten Tomato and box office numbers don’t paint a fair picture at all. It’s in a similar vein to many Guy Ritchie movies with its madcap caper antics, humor, violence, and backtracking style of storytelling. There’s a lot that’s been said about his unique style of filmmaking. When it fails, it can be inscrutable, over-thought, and exclusionary. When it works, Ritchie’s movies become non-stop joyrides, where it’s clear everyone is having an excellent time.

The plot, which involves Orson’s team convincing a movie star, played by Josh Hartnett, who is once again proving that this Hartnett Renaissance is not to be a brief era, to help them infiltrate a crime syndicate, is overburdened and yet unimportant. It doesn’t matter that a lot of it doesn’t make much sense under a microscope; Operation Fortune flows, and the inconsistencies are easily brushed aside. This is not a “turn off your brain and enjoy” movie, which is a much more insulting tagline than it sounds; it’s a “focus on everything but the plot steps” movie.

That’s not even to say the plot is dumb; there’s just quite a bit going on that it doesn’t always pay to track one setpiece to the next with a magnifying glᴀss. What is worth paying attention to is just how much fun everyone is having, and that includes Ritchie. Statham is at his best when he’s allowed to be funny. It’s how he got his start, in fact, with none other than Guy Ritchie in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Operation Fortune gives everyone a chance to have fun.

At a time when a lot of action-comedies skimp on both the action and the comedy, Operation Fortune cares just that little bit more. The chemistry between the characters is believable, the stakes are energizing even if they’re somewhat confusing, and the script is strong, as many Ritchie scripts are. It’s not the greatest action film of all time, but you won’t be disappointed if you turn it on one night.

Not Enough People Gave Operation Fortune A Chance

Guy Ritchie Is Not Appreciated Enough

It’s too bad that Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre did not receive the recognition it deserved, and it feels a bit like not enough people saw the movie. It went remarkably unremarked as it were. One of the issues could be an obvious one: the name. Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre sounds like an old straight-to-video action movie that you would find on the bottom shelf of a Blockbuster video. “Operation Fortune” may have been a bit more intriguing, but even that sounds too generic. This long тιтle is a mouthful, barely able to fit on a ticket stub.

That’s a hard sell. The other issue is one that Guy Ritchie fans like myself may not want to admit. Despite his success, the creativity and uniqueness of his films, and the fact that everything he makes is worthwhile to some degree, Ritchie has just not broken out into the mainstream. For fans of his work, the announcement of a new movie sends shockwaves. However, for the rest of the movie going public, they likely only know him as the guy who directed Sherlock Holmes, and even then, they may be remembering Robert Downey Jr. more than anything.

He’s sadly just not a director who can easily push the cultural needle. He certainly should be. Several of his films are fantastic and the rest that aren’t are still very good or, at the very least, have fun performances in them. However, people don’t turn out for them. Another issue that is not an issue for fans, is how prolific he is. Ritchie is constantly making movies. He even directed Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant the same year as Operation Fortune. His films get lost between one another, and it can be hard to know where to dive in and catch up.

Operation Fortune Stands Out In Jason Statham’s Filmography

Some Of Statham’s Best Work Has Come In Guy Ritchie Movies

Jason Statham has an exceptionally enjoyable filmography. Even the worst b-movie action films he’s been a part of are still a lot of fun thanks to his unique blend of charm, physical capabilities, and significant comedic prowess. Plenty of action stars can get a laugh, but few can play opposite Melissa McCarthy and not get blown off the screen in a comedic scene. That’s not to say everything has been great. For every Spy there is a Meg 2. For every Crank, there’s an Expend4bles. Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre falls on the positive side of his filmography.

He’s rarely more at home in movies than he is in a Guy Ritchie movie. Statham just understands the director’s staging and scripts better than anyone and can slot right into the tone of Ritchie’s movies, in part, because he helped develop that tone. Operation Fortune lets Statham be funny in a way he’s often not allowed to be in his films.

In things like the Fast & Furious and The Meg franchises, he’s funny because the situations are so absurd, but here, he’s given the clever lines of a Ritchie script, and he knows how to sling them. It’s Statham at his best, and the reason audiences were charmed by him in the first place back in 1998.

What Guy Ritchie And Jason Statham Have Said About Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre

Ritchie Was Changing The Script On The Fly

Regarding Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, Jason Statham had a lot of great things to say about his castmates. In particular, he lauded Aubrey Plaza, saying (via Collider),

“She is so funny. Again, she’s got incredible improvisational skills, and a lot of the funny lines that she delivers actually came from her. You know, she’s so good, and she’s unconventional to a point that you can never put your finger on how quirky and how funny she is. Her timing is so great, and she’s just so watchable. She’s my new favorite actress. I love Aubrey Plaza.”

That’s a pretty glowing review of a castmate and Statham did not stop there. About Hugh Grant he said,

“But Hugh is just, he’s so versatile, you know, he’s a terrific… He’s got such a great depth to his ability, and I think to see him in a role like this – he did decades of rom-coms, and to see him do something like this, it’s so complex and so quirky, and I just think he’s been undersold. I think this is really something, a special skill that people need to see. He’s just great.”

Clearly, everyone on set was getting along and having fun together, which shines through in the film. Ritchie is known to switch up his scripts on the fly, something Statham said, “…is a very tricky thing.” Even with that added pressure, the actors all seem comfortable and natural. Ritchie himself talks about how often he changed the script (via Collider),

“I didn’t like the script when I started with the script, and that was sort of the challenge. It was something that I cobbled up with a couple of chaps that I worked with. It was a bit of a feathery fish and the challenge was how to make it a less feathery fish. We just rewrote every scene on the day in this film almost completely. You had general ideas which were fun, like the Danny Francesco idea that you’ve taken a movie star as a spy.”

This frantic way of screenwriting is probably why the plot feels difficult to follow at times, but it also shows just how much Ritchie cares about his projects. He’s not going to film something to get it over with. He’s going to write and rewrite until it’s to his liking. That’s the real reason Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre works so well. Guy Ritchie cared about it, and you can always sense when the team behind a movie actually cared.