Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat | The week Great Britain

This tale of war audacity is the kind of film to watch “with your dad on a Sunday afternoon before or after.” Ice cold in Alexsaid Deborah Ross in The audience. Based on a book by Ben Macintyre, it tells of a British operation to cover up the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen play the two intelligence officers who led the mission to retrieve the body of a Welsh man, dress it in a Royal Marine’s uniform and fill it with forged “top secret” papers about a planned Invade Greece and drop it in the Mediterranean. Directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in love, The best exotic Marigold hotel) and starring not one but two Mr. Darcys, the film is well acted and “very entertaining”.

“This is a well-made, ‘nicely assembled’ film that carefully recreates the look and feel of wartime London,” said Geoffrey Macnab in The i paper. The acting is also “warm and strong”; Aside from the two lead roles, we also have Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, Johnny Flynn as young naval officer Ian Fleming (“a few years away from writing his first Bond novels”) and Kelly Macdonald, who stars in a romantic subplot. “What the film lacks, however, is any real sense of dramatic upheaval or surprise.” Essentially, this is the story of an “elaborate prank,” and after the officers dump the decoys into the sea, they have no choice but to “wait until the Nazis take the bait”.

Madden had a lot to cover in a two-hour film, Tim Robey said in The Daily Telegraph, and the pacing is a little off, with sleepy sections in the middle, a rushed third act, and plenty of exposition along the way. Too bad: Worth seeing, but could have been done better.