The cinema loves dead Nazis simply because it is scared to death. Action movies need to have good guys and bad guys, but who can be bad guys these days? If you put Chinese, Arabs, Colombians, or any other group on the standard of the villains, it would mean too great a commercial risk.
So what's left? Aliens - or Nazis, because no one will be offended by their name. Maybe one day we will reach the day when film scholars in New York will say that the Nazis were actually victims of colonialism and the films against them are offensive. But we are not there yet. The film describes how Winston Churchill assembles a group of several special agents, all of whom walk the line between insanity and genius. And so, Ritchie is very loosely based here on the story of covert action against the Nazis in World War II. But as fun as it is to see dead Nazis, I'm a bit tired of this type. It represents to me more artistic laziness than any real interest in the subject. "Unit for Ungentlemanly Warfare" is pale and generic, and looks like it was made for streaming and then decided to release it in theaters. The action is not exciting, the jokes are not funny, the situations are quite random, and most of the characters are not interesting. The result is harmless, but a week after watching it, I remember very little. Unlike many World War II films before him, Ritchie is careful to link the war to the Holocaust and emphasize the Jewish motivation to fight the Nazis and take revenge on them. More importantly, the Jewish spy becomes one of the most significant and dominant characters in the plot. The usual comic representation of Churchill in British films is revealed here as a kind of brat. Played by Eisa Gonzalez, this spy turns out to be a spy himself, played by Rory Keener. The film was released in cinemas a year ago, and "The Gentlemen," a new series penned by him, recently appeared on Netflix.