Operation Mincemeat

Based on true events, Operation Mincemeat follows several British officers, including Colin Firth’s Ewen Montagu, Matthew Macfadyen’s Charles Cholmondeley, and Kelly Macdonald’s Jean Leslie, as they attempt to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily during the Second World War. It’s intriguing subject matter that’s employed to sporadically watchable yet ultimately lackluster effect by John Madden, as the filmmaker, working from a screenplay by Michelle Ashford, delivers an old-school drama that progresses at an exceedingly deliberate pace that eventually renders its positive attributes moot – which is a shame, really, given that the picture does possess a number of entertaining, agreeable elements (including, and especially, top-notch performances by a roster of familiar faces). And although Madden has suffused the proceedings with a handful of admittedly engaging sequences (eg the team makes the final preparations for a corpse at the center of the aforementioned deception), Operation Mincemeat progresses into a wildly erratic midsection that egregiously stresses the protagonists’ less-than-spellbinding personal problems (ie a love triangle just seems like an odd choice for a story like this) – which, when coupled with an overlong running time and emphasis on the tedious minutia of the scheme, cements the movie’s place as a disappointing endeavor that should’ve been seriously streamlined.

** out of ****