114 min | R | March 3, 2023 | Lionsgate
A disgraced private operative gets pulled back in to stop a stolen weapon from hitting the black market. He needs a movie star to charm an arms dealer who collects celebrities. The plan is more fun than the execution.
Orson Fortune is a freelance spy with expensive tastes and a fear of flying. The British government pulls him out of his comfortable exile to recover a stolen technology before it sells to the highest bidder. The catch is that the buyer, a billionaire arms broker named Greg Simmonds, idolizes a Hollywood action star. So Fortune’s team recruits the actor to play himself and get close to the target. The film is a heist comedy dressed as an espionage thriller, and what it is really about is the gap between the men who do violence and the men who perform it.
Jason Statham plays Fortune with his usual low-affect menace, trading on irritation rather than charm. He is good at this and the role asks for nothing more. Aubrey Plaza plays tech operative Sarah Fidel with a flirtatious deadpan that gives the team scenes their only real spark. Hugh Grant plays Simmonds as a cockney social climber who treats menace as a party trick, and he steals every scene he occupies. Josh Hartnett plays the recruited movie star Danny Francesco with a panicked vanity that lands the film’s best joke, which is that the fake spy is more nervous than the real one. Cary Elwes and Eddie Marsan handle the bureaucratic handlers, and Bugzy Malone gives the muscle some quiet weight.
Guy Ritchie directs from a script he wrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, and the seams show. The action sequences favor wide, clean geography over the kinetic editing Ritchie built his name on, which makes the set pieces legible and inert. The camera lingers on Mediterranean resorts and yacht decks as if the locations are doing the work the plot will not. The score pushes a jaunty, finger-snapping cool that signals fun the scenes do not earn. Ritchie stages the climax around a hidden auction and resolves it with a shrug rather than a payoff.
This is a competent machine that runs on the goodwill its actors generate and little else. The pieces are calibrated for a franchise that assumes its own charm. Grant and Hartnett supply genuine comedy, and the film perks up whenever they share the frame. The rest coasts on the idea that watching attractive people scheme in nice places is enough. It is a glossy diversion that mistakes ease for confidence and never decides whether it wants to be a thriller or a joke about one.