Brit filmmaker Guy Ritchie’s latest action caper has had an unusual path to screens in his homeland.
The ‘Snatch’ director is back with a new World War II geezers-on-a-mission movie, ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, and after a US cinema release back in April, it’s landed directly on Prime Video in the UK.
Ritchie has gone from ‘The Gentleman’ to plain ungentlemanly in his all-action telling of a real-life raid on Nazi-occupied West Africa in 1941. Based on historian Damien Lewis’s non-fiction book of the same name, it follows a small posse of special forces commandos on the real-life Operation Postmaster.
‘The plan was to steal an Italian cargo liner that was being used to communicate with U-boats in the Atlantic,’ the film’s military advisor, Paul Biddiss, tells us, ‘and drag it into international waters to be found by Allied warships’.
Starring in Ritchie’s boy’s own war flick are Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, ‘3 Body Problem’s Eiza González, Alan Ritchson and Cary Elwes. Think ‘The Great Escape’, ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘The Guns of Navarone’ – given a slug of the ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ man’s trademark larky irreverence.
Instead of bemoaning the missed chance to catch this bunch of daring special forces chaps giving Jerry a bleeding nose on the big screen – and the reviews out of the US were pretty positive – take consolation in that fact that you can stream it for free right now. Here’s how.
How to stream Guy Ritchie’s new war movie
‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ is streaming now on Prime Video. The usual subscription charge is £8.99 a month (£95/year), which comes with assorted other benefits (free delivery of Amazon products etc), but newbies are entitled to a free 30-day trial. So you can sign up, watch the movie and then cancel, if you’re maxed out on streaming subscriptions.
Bear in mind that if you want to watch it ad-free, you’ll need to pony up an additional £2.99. As of February this year, that’s the new surcharge for ad-free viewing on Prime, on top of all regular Prime Video subscriptions.
When can you stream ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’?
The World War II caper is streaming on Prime Video in the UK now.
How accurate is ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’? We asked its military advisor.