movie review operation mincemeat

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, operation mincemeat.

Now streaming on:

“Operation Mincemeat” looks like a proper British spy drama and for the most part, well, it is. It’s based on the true story of wartime daring and heroism, features a classy cast including Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen and has a director in John Madden (“ Shakespeare in Love ,” the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies) who’s made his name with exactly this kind of sturdy, old-fashioned fare.

But the story itself is so absurd and is told with enough surprises and dry humor that it’s constantly engaging. Imagine “Weekend at Bernie’s” set during World War II, with a dash of romance sprinkled in amid the spy craft and physical gags, and you’ll have some idea of the tricky tonal balance this film improbably achieves. “Operation Mincemeat” takes its title from the real-life mission that tricked Hitler into believing the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than Sicily, in 1943. Ben Macintyre ’s non-fiction book of the same name also provides the basis for television veteran Michelle Ashford ’s sprawling script. But while the film as a whole may seem dense and restrained, the performances and attention to detail consistently bring it to life.

“Operation Mincemeat” also serves as a bit of a James Bond origin story. One of the British intelligence officers behind this unlikely plan was Ian Fleming , who would go on to create the iconic 007 character based on his own experiences working in espionage. So if you ever wondered about the inspiration behind such legendary figures as M and Q, you’re in for some amusing enlightenment. The charismatic actor and singer Johnny Flynn plays Fleming and provides the film’s dramatic narration, accompanied by the clickety-clack of his typewriter while the other members of his interagency intelligence squad get actual work done in their hidden headquarters. But who could blame the aspiring novelist for wanting to take notes? This stuff’s just too juicy.

Firth’s Ewen Montagu and Macfadyen’s Charles Cholmondeley lead the scheme to secure a body, dress it in a military uniform and dump it off the coast of Spain in the hope that it will wash ashore with a briefcase full of fake documents intact. A million pieces large and small must fall into place to ensure that this disinformation falls into precisely the right hands in order to deceive Hitler and break his army’s hold on Europe. And as is the case in any great heist movie, much of the fun comes from watching the players work through their plan. Here, that means creating a fictional identity and backstory for their deceased drifter that’s so complete and air-tight that it won’t raise suspicion. These brainstorming sessions between the officers Montagu and Cholmondeley, clerk Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald) and secretary Hester Leggett (a lovely Penelope Wilton ) have a snappy, lighthearted pace, but they also allow us to get to know these characters as it becomes clear that they’re not just playing a high-stakes game of make-believe. They’re investing their own very-real personalities, dreams and regrets into the made-up Capt. William Martin.

They’re also making themselves vulnerable in a profession that’s all about keeping up your defenses. That extends to the romantic bond that steadily builds between the widowed Jean and Ewen, who sent his wife and kids to America to protect them because they’re Jewish; early scenes suggest that the couple’s marriage was in jeopardy anyway. Macdonald and Firth have a sweet and easy chemistry tinged with the slightest sadness and world-weariness. They’re both great. But this burgeoning relationship grows complicated as it becomes obvious that Charles has feelings for Jean, as well; Macfadyen is mostly stoic, but he gets to deliver plenty of wry zingers. And mistrust begins to bubble up among everyone on the team as deceptions within the deception emerge.

“Operation Mincemeat” grows legitimately tense on both the personal and professional levels as the team executes the mission and waits anxiously to learn whether it was successful. Tiny zigs and zags along the way could mean disaster at any moment, and characters who may have seemed minor at first become majorly important as they’re forced to improvise. At times, you may wish Madden had taken the same kind of chances as the masterminds behind Operation Mincemeat, but his film is still sufficiently rousing.

On Netflix today.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

LaRoy, Texas

Robert daniels.

Clint Worthington

We Grown Now

Peyton robinson.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Evil Does Not Exist

Glenn kenny.

I Saw the TV Glow

Film credits.

Operation Mincemeat (2022)

Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual content, brief war violence, disturbing images, and smoking.

128 minutes

Colin Firth as Ewen Montazac

Matthew MacFadyen as Charles Cholmondeley

Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming

Kelly MacDonald as Jean Leslie

Penelope Wilton as Hester Leggett

Jason Isaacs as Admiral John Godfrey

Mark Gatiss as Ivor Montazac

Hattie Morahan as Iris Montazac

Paul Ritter as Bentley Purchase

Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill

Lorne MacFadyen as Sgt. Roger Dearborn / Glyndwr Michael

• John Madden

Writer (book)

• Ben Macintyre
• Michelle Ashford

Cinematographer

• Sebastian Blenkov
• Victoria Boydell
• Thomas Newman

Latest blog posts

Cannes 2024: Marcello Mio, Parthenope, Elementary

Fantastic Start to Fourth Season of Evil Maintains Creepy Quality

West Side Oratory: Judas and the Black Messiah

Cannes 2024 Video #4: Jason Gorber on Canada's Films

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: A Bland Hash

In this World War II drama from Netflix, a team of spies uses a vagrant’s corpse to outwit the Nazis.

• Share full article

By Lena Wilson

Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers died fighting in World War II. “Operation Mincemeat,” directed by John Madden, tells the real-life story of one man drafted into the war effort after death — or rather, it tells the story of the men who conscripted him. In this bizarrely celebratory tale, the titular “mincemeat” is a troubling figure, weighing heavy on the conscience as the men who’ve enlisted him engage in petty infighting.

Colin Firth plays Ewen Montagu, a former barrister who teams up with Charles Cholmondeley, played by Matthew Macfadyen, after hearing his plan to deceive Hitler by using forged papers attached to a corpse. They’re aided by two girls Friday: Hester, Montagu’s steadfast “spinster” secretary played by Penelope Wilton, and Jean, a younger typist played by Kelly Macdonald.

They end up pilfering the corpse of Glyndwr Michael , a homeless Welshman who died from ingesting rat poison. There are conflicting accounts as to whether Montagu and Cholmondeley informed Michael’s family before repurposing his body. Michelle Ashford’s screenplay, based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, has an unexpected relative nearly sabotage their plans before, oddly, disappearing from the script. This seems the filmmakers’ main attempt at injecting some conscience into their protagonists — the scene ends with Montagu declaring, “May God forgive us all.”

But “Operation Mincemeat” is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic. As the leading men spar over Jean (yawn) and their bond is further threatened by a superior officer with Red Scare accusations, we’re expected to lose ourselves in their human squabbles. Alas, the more provocative Michael — and all the existential and ethical issues he represents — lingers in the periphery.

Operation Mincemeat Rated PG-13 for light sexuality and a gnarly autopsy. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

Lena Wilson is a project manager at The New York Times and a freelance writer covering film, TV, technology and lesbian culture. More about Lena Wilson

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Season 49 of “Saturday Night Live” has ended. Here’s a look back at its most memorable monologues, sketches, product parodies and impressions .

“Megalopolis,” the first film from the director Francis Ford Coppola in 13 years, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Here’s what to know .

Why is the “Planet of the Apes” franchise so gripping and effective? Because it doesn’t monkey around, our movie critic writes .

Luke Newton has been in the sexy Netflix hit “Bridgerton” from the start. But a new season will be his first as co-lead — or chief hunk .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Colin firth and matthew macfadyen in netflix’s ‘operation mincemeat’: film review.

Kelly Macdonald and Penelope Wilton also star in the true story of a World War II British intelligence unit’s scheme to break Hitler’s grip on Europe with a high-risk diversionary tactic, directed by John Madden.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

While traditional American war films tend to lean hard into valor, sacrifice and vigorous patriotism, the British equivalent more often favors heart and faith, duty and stiff-upper-lip resolve, especially in the country’s rich library of home-front dramas. Audiences with affection for the latter will enjoy John Madden ’s Operation Mincemeat , a gripping account of an elaborate World War II espionage deception that helped turn the tide for the Allied Forces in Europe. A far more decorous affair than its macho-burger title would suggest, this is a classy production with a first-rate ensemble cast, splicing the story’s intrigue with a poignant vein of melodrama.

Related Stories

Eddie murphy is back on the beat in netflix's full 'beverly hills cop: axel f' trailer, netflix shares first look at liam hemsworth in 'the witcher' season 4 teaser.

Warner Bros. released the film in the U.K. April 15, with Netflix to follow in the U.S. and other territories on May 11. It’s a polished example of gently rousing entertainment for wartime history enthusiasts, along the lines of Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest from 2016.

Operation Mincemeat

Release date : Wednesday, May 11 Cast : Colin Firth, Matthew MacFadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn, Jason Isaacs, Mark Gatiss, Hattie Morahan, Paul Ritter, Alex Jennings, Simon Russell Beale Director : John Madden Screenwriter : Michelle Ashford, based on the book by Ben Macintyre

The bonus here for fans of quintessentially British spycraft is the presence of a pre-007 Ian Fleming during his time as assistant to Admiral John Godfrey (steely Jason Isaacs), the head of British Naval Intelligence who became the model for the fictional MI5 chief, “M,” in the James Bond novels. Played with martini-dry wit by a debonair Johnny Flynn , Fleming provides the narration and is frequently seen tapping away at a typewriter on what the viewer assumes will form the foundations of his more celebrated career to come. It’s a low-key running joke that seemingly every second person working in British espionage aspires to a side hustle as a spy novelist.

The stranger-than-fiction case that provides the film’s clunky title is a plan purportedly hatched by Fleming and developed in 1943 by Naval Intelligence officers Ewen Montagu ( Colin Firth ) and Charles Cholmondeley ( Matthew Macfadyen ).

Urgency was building for Britain to find a way into occupied Europe, and Churchill (a gruff Simon Russell Beale) had determined that Sicily was the ideal “soft underbelly” to stage the invasion. But given the ease with which the Germans could anticipate that move, a strategic military deception was necessary. The operation aimed to plant documents outlining a falsified planned invasion of Greece on a corpse that would wash up on the coast of Spain, where the information would be intercepted by Nazi spies.

The episode was filmed by Ronald Neame in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was , which was based on Montagu’s book of the same name and starred Cliffton Webb and Gloria Grahame.

This absorbingly detailed account was adapted from historian Ben Macintyre’s book (also the subject of a 2010 BBC documentary) by television writer Michelle Ashford, whose credits include Masters of Sex and The Pacific . Her script balances a methodical retelling of the complex military deception with robust character portraits of the principal figures involved, giving us a rooting interest not just in the warfare maneuvers but also in the personal stakes of those working behind the scenes.

A distinguished barrister at the Old Bailey, Montagu is introduced at a somber moment during a formal dinner that the guests assume is to announce his retirement. In fact, it’s a farewell for his Jewish wife, Iris (Hattie Morahan), and their children, whom Ewen is packing off to America to safeguard against the potential German occupation of England. A strain in the marriage caused by Ewen’s remoteness and his consuming devotion to his work casts doubt over their future reunion.

While brushing off questions from his nosy gadabout brother Ivor (Mark Gatiss), Montagu digs in with MI5’s Twenty Committee, finding a like-minded ally in Cholmondeley, a former RAF pilot whose big feet and bad eyes prompt his self-deprecating identification as “a flightless bird.” Admiral Godfrey is sniffy about their preposterous deception proposal’s chances of success, but Churchill gives it the go-ahead, so they are installed in a basement office and put to work.

The drama’s most compelling sections are those in which Ewen and Charles seek to make their plan foolproof by attending to every minute background detail concerning the fictitious Naval courier, Major William Martin, whom the Nazis must believe was shot down in the Mediterranean, carrying strategic military information. That begins with finding a corpse that can pass as a drowned man, a brisk search that Ashford injects with both humor and the solemn acknowledgment that they are commandeering a lost human life.

Aided by the staunch director of the Admiralty’s secretarial unit, Hester Leggett ( Penelope Wilton ), they then work against the clock to organize the mission before the body decomposes, synchronizing their efforts with the movements of a submarine sailing from Scotland that would release the body in Spanish coastal waters. That involves not only preparation of the military documents and identification papers but also of personal possessions like a photograph of the Major’s fiancée, a love letter, even the receipt for an engagement ring.

That’s where bright, resourceful MI5 clerk Jean Leslie ( Kelly Macdonald ) comes in. Insisting on a seat at the table in exchange for her contribution, she agrees to provide her photograph to serve as Major Martin’s sweetheart, whom they name Pam. Madden and Ashford deftly intertwine elements of a caper with the dizzying pleasures of creating fiction as the group fills in details of not one but two complete lives, William and Pam.

Where the film inches toward more prosaic territory is in the formation of a delicate romantic triangle as the widowed Jean grows closer with Ewen during late nights in the office or at their regular Soho watering hole, The Gargoyle Club. Their blossoming relationship, while constrained by British reserve and propriety, sparks jealousy in Charles, making him susceptible to Godfrey’s request that he spy on Ewen, whose brother Ivor is a suspected Communist sympathizer believed to be sharing secrets with the Russians.

That subplot is almost one too many, but the film’s melancholy undercurrents, and its keen-eyed observation of the solitude of all four principals, makes the more melodramatic strands both involving and affecting.

The luminous Macdonald is especially lovely as Jean warms to the gentlemanly attentions of Ewen, while Firth conveys the roiling emotions beneath his stiff formality, his uncharacteristic directness becoming quite moving when he summons the nerve to speak openly. This dovetails nicely with the story’s distinction between truth and deception. The indispensable Wilton brings her customary wisdom and clipped authority to a character fully alert to the interpersonal feelings among her colleagues while keeping the larger objective firmly in focus.

But it’s Macfadyen, shedding the smarminess that has made him so beloved as Tom Wambsgans on Succession , who gives the standout performance. Behind his horn-rimmed spectacles and starchy mustache, Charles is a droll though diffident eccentric, perhaps even envious of his war-hero brother, who died on foreign soil and whose return home for a proper burial becomes a leverage tool used by Godfrey. The “purity” of the love between the fictional William and Pam and its sorrowful outcome touches all of them, but Macfadyen makes Charles’ unspoken yearning quietly shattering.

Thomas Newman’s pleasingly understated score favors soulfulness over suspense, but the script accelerates tension from the moment the “drowned” body is loaded onto a donkey cart in Huelva, and an over-zealous local coroner threatens to derail months of meticulous planning. The grave notion of sending 100,000 men into battle in Sicily in what could well be a trap sustains that tension for the duration. Ashford’s amusing eye for character detail is evident even late in the action, with the introduction of Capt. David Ainsworth (Nicholas Rowe), a dashing British agent in Spain, willing to deploy his charms for the cause.

Handsomely shot by Sebastian Blenkov in dark, burnished tones befitting both the era and the secrecy of the plot, this is an agreeably old-fashioned movie elevated by sharp writing, impeccable performances and by a story all the more incredible because it actually happened.

Full credits

Distribution: Netflix Production companies: See-Saw Films, Cohen Media Group, in association with Archery Pictures Cast: Colin Firth, Matthew MacFadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn, Jason Isaacs, Mark Gatiss, Hattie Morahan, Paul Ritter, Alex Jennings, Simon Russell Beale, James Fleet, Nicholas Rowe, Will Keen, Charlotte Hamblin, Lorne Macfadyen, Rufus Wright, Jonjo O’Neill, Ruby Bentall, Ellie Haddington Director: John Madden Screenwriter: Michelle Ashford, based on the book by Ben Macintyre Producers: Charles S. Cohen, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Kris Thykier Executive producers: Simon Gillis, Christian McLaughlin Director of photography: Sebastian Blenkov Production designer: John Paul Kelly Costume designer: Andrea Flesch Music: Thomas Newman Editor: Victoria Boydell Casting: Jina Jay

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘atlas’ review: jennifer lopez and simu liu in a another netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry, alfonso cuarón says he directed ‘harry potter’ movie only after guillermo del toro called him an “arrogant a**hole”, ‘beating hearts’ review: love conquers all, including good taste, in overwrought french crime romance starring adèle exarchopoulos, ‘all we imagine as light’ review: a moving and luminous chronicle of two women searching for connection in mumbai, jason schwartzman, eva longoria, danielle brooks join michelle pfeiffer in amazon mgm holiday comedy ‘oh. what. fun.’ (exclusive), ‘the village next to paradise’ review: somali family drama doubles as a potent portrait of life in the shadow of war.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Link to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• Hit Man Link to Hit Man
• Babes Link to Babes

New TV Tonight

• Evil: Season 4
• Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A.: Season 1
• Trying: Season 4
• Tires: Season 1
• Fairly OddParents: A New Wish: Season 1
• Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza: Season 1
• Jurassic World: Chaos Theory: Season 1
• Mulligan: Season 2
• The 1% Club: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Dark Matter: Season 1
• Outer Range: Season 2
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• Bridgerton: Season 3
• Bodkin: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• The 8 Show: Season 1
• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Bridgerton: Season 3 Link to Bridgerton: Season 3
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Cannes Film Festival 2024: Movie Scorecard

Best Horror Movies of 2024 Ranked – New Scary Movies to Watch

Asian-American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Vote For the Best Movie of 1999 – Round 1

‘Seen on the Screen’ Podcast: A Celebration of Universal Stories 

• Trending on RT
• Furiosa First Reviews
• Most Anticipated 2025 Movies
• Cannes Film Festival Preview
• TV Premiere Dates

Operation Mincemeat Reviews

The melodrama of the unlikely romance is a minor distraction. “Operation Mincemeat” is well-crafted. Michelle Ashford’s script ably handles the intrigue while maintaining tension and injecting dry humor.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2023

Operation Mincemeat is a stylish dive into history with a fantastic cast ready to show off their chops at any given moment.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2023

Operation Mincemeat is an incredibly thrilling watch if not for the simple fact that this audacious event actually occurred during the second world war.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10 | Jan 4, 2023

...progresses at an exceedingly deliberate pace that eventually renders its positive attributes moot...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 19, 2022

Operation Mincemeat does not go gently into that good night. The Argo of World War II is able to overcome the obstacles and avoid the pitfalls in its way to spin and enjoyable and entertaining yarn.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 13, 2022

Operation Mincemeat is content to rest on the considerable talents of its stars, Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, but it lacks a flair for the dramatic that such a wild espionage plot truly deserves.

Full Review | Oct 10, 2022

When “Operation Mincemeat” is focusing on the nitty-gritty, the clinical elements of the operation and how these people hope to pull it off in a way that doesn’t get people killed, it can be thrilling.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 22, 2022

Adapted from Ben Macintyre’s book, the screenplay is a brisk and jolly affair, taking gamey delight in comparing the art of espionage to the fibs of professional storytellers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 24, 2022

A vaguely enjoyable watch because of the strength of its casting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 12, 2022

This film is an interesting study not just for history buffs, but also communications and public relations students.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 29, 2022

It's a character-driven true story of a British operation in World War II.

Full Review | Original Score: 3 1/2 stars | Jul 15, 2022

No heist plot ever sounds as exciting as it is when boiled down to a big-picture overview, and that's true of Operation Mincemeat. It's thrilling on-screen, though, including when it dives into the tiniest of gripping specifics.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2022

When the film sticks to the intricacies of the planning and execution of the ruse rather than a half-baked romantic triangle that feels more like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels its quite enjoyable as a matinee feature.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 13, 2022

So much of the movie's script is exposition... that it feels drowned, too. In addition, illicit romance, jealousy, and competition are pebbled in so that the film's focus pulls from the operation itself.

Full Review | Jun 2, 2022

Academic and relatively vigorous, but never as exciting as the story it tells... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 27, 2022

It’s dutiful, steely-eyed and, alas, just a bit dull.

Full Review | May 25, 2022

Operation Mincemeat isn’t fully satisfying but it’s still an interesting yarn to add to the memory bank.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | May 24, 2022

The story and the characters gain literary depth, and the war plot shares screentime with romance. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 23, 2022

The cast is big and typically I eat this espionage stuff up, but Operation Mincemeat is a bloated slog that’s tough to swallow.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 21, 2022

A terrific job by John Madden, who we trust to do this sort of thing.

Full Review | May 21, 2022

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: Colin Firth Stars in a Middling Netflix Thriller About an Amazing WWII Saga

David ehrlich.

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

Around halfway through “Operation Mincemeat” — a busy yet somewhat rousing WWII spy thriller based on the English military scheme of the same name — I began to appreciate why this might be John Madden ’s best movie since “ Shakespeare in Love ”: It’s a story about a bunch of British men (and a smattering of British women) who are trying to stage an elaborate show in the face of escalating crises. Except this time, their audience isn’t the Queen of England, a crowd of rowdy peasants, and a pissed-off Colin Firth . This time, their audience is the Nazi intelligence network, and their lead actor is a pissed-off Colin Firth. And unlike “Shakespeare in Love,” much of this story is actually true. How embarrassing for Hitler.

Here’s the gist of it: Desperate to turn the tide of the war, yet painfully aware that German moles were allowing the Nazis to anticipate their every move, two members of the British intelligence service cooked up a ridiculous plan to misdirect their enemy. It was an idea straight out of the “Weekend at Bernie’s” school of spycraft.

Related Stories ‘To a Land Unknown’ Review: This Palestinian Twist on ‘Midnight Cowboy’ Is Full of Masterful Storytelling and Wrenching Humanity  ‘Viet and Nam’ Review: This Spellbinding Drama Explores Young Romance — and History’s Ghosts

Step one was to find an anonymous corpse (some mincemeat , if you will). Step two was to invent a character for it — the fictitious Captain (Acting Major) William Martin — complete with a detailed and heartbreakingly romantic backstory. Step three was to fill the captain’s jacket pocket with confidential documents that suggested the Allies were intending to invade Greece and Sardinia, and step four was to let the body wash ashore off the coast of Spain, where news of its arrival was sure to spread throughout the Abwehr . If all went well, the Allies would find their actual target — Sicily — sitting relatively unguarded, and would be able to launch the Italian Campaign from there. It was like putting a message in a bottle that said “please let us win the war,” and hoping that it would miraculously wash up at Hitler’s feet 1,000 miles away.

Did Operation Mincemeat work? Madden’s film offers a better answer to that question than history ever has. Nevertheless, this spirited piece of light entertainment also makes clear that its path from crackpot idea to galaxy brain military ruse was filled with as many divots and detours as the evolution from “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” to Shakespeare’s greatest tale of woe. And while “Operation Mincemeat” is as breezy as you might expect from such a beach read of a dad movie — which is narrated by Johnny Flynn as a young Ian Fleming, so that its target audience doesn’t get put off by the star-crossed love story that forms in the margins of Michelle Ashford’s script — whatever smidgeon of weight it accrues before the end can be traced back to the personal tragedies it kicks up along the way.

The action begins in the early days of 1943, as upper-crust barrister Ewen Montagu (Firth) — who hasn’t tried a case in three years — finally drops the façade and commits to his work as a Naval intelligence officer. Now that his wife and children are fleeing to America (itself a cover story for a rocky marriage), there will be less pressure to keep up appearances. There will also be more reason for Ewen to be wary of his black sheep of a brother, a former Communist firestarter, but that drama won’t rear its head until later in this story of strained loyalties large and small.

Ewen’s partner in crime, on the other hand, believes himself to be the failson of his family. Despite being a relatively high-ranking MI5 agent, Charles Cholmondeley (“Succession” star Matthew Macfadyen , who continues to find success in his exquisite portrayals of failing upwards) still thinks of himself as a sad clown with large feet and bad eyes in the shadow of his war hero brother. Charles can hardly simper his way through a meeting with Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) without emitting all sorts of “the wrong kid died!” energy.

He and Ewen need a win for themselves almost as badly as they need a win for their country, but their furtive camaraderie is soon threatened by the zero-sum love triangle that takes shape when both men swoon — or whatever you call it when monastically repressed middle-aged British spies twitch their stiff upper lips with lust — over the secretary who agrees to pose as the late Capt. Martin’s one true love. An excellent Kelly Macdonald anchors the cast as the willful but wanting Jean Leslie, her performance allowing Ewen, Christopher, and the rest of their semi-informed collaborators to see “Martin’s” corpse as a vessel for all of the emotions they’ve been forced to suppress during the war. And those are the only emotions that “Operation Mincemeat” reliably provokes.

“In any story,” Fleming’s crusty narration intones, “there is that which is seen, and that which is hidden. This is especially true in stories of war.” The implication is that many of the most crucial battles of WWII were fought in the shadows, but “Operation Mincemeat” is most compelling when it takes things a step further and focuses its attention on the wars that people fought within themselves.

The film is primarily interested in the nitty-gritty of planning the ruse; in Ewen and Christopher finding the right corpse, drowning it in the perfect spot, weathering the notes in its jacket pocket so that the coded information they contain seems like an unforced error and not a wacky gambit, etc. Much of this stuff is spryly written and conveyed at a steady pace, even if the characters never miss an opportunity to remind us of the score, resulting in dozens of needless lines such as “Every piece of intelligence says the Nazis are waiting for us in Greece, and every piece of intelligence may be part of the greatest deception the Nazis have ever played.” It’s never a good sign when a spy thriller can’t trust audiences to accept its stakes.

Worse is how “Operation Mincemeat” slices its story into smaller and smaller bits as it goes along, frustrating the film’s more nuanced character work (and disempowering the rich performances behind it). For something that unfolds like a heist movie about the laundering of misinformation, the endless clickety-clack of typewriters simply isn’t able to generate the kind of heart-in-your-throat suspense it needs to keep the plot kicking along.

On the contrary, the movie’s frustratingly brief asides into the private lives of its characters prove far more gripping. The furtive romantic flirtation between Ewen and Jean — often filtered through the love story they invent for their decoy corpse — offers a tension that’s lacking from the results of the operation itself. Even the dynamic between Ewen and Christopher, which is complicated by its own degree of distrust, hints at the far richer drama that’s percolating just below the surface of a thriller that’s too seduced by the absurdities of its own true story.

Whatever their suspicions, Ewen and Christopher obviously both want Britain to win the war; it’s their uncertain loyalties to each other, and their even more uncertain loyalties to their own families, that lead to the real subterfuge. When “Operation Mincemeat” slows down enough to see into those shadows — when the film slows down enough to leverage the fictions its characters invent for the Nazis against the ones they invent for themselves — it finds a hidden war that’s worth fighting to the end.

“Operation Mincemeat” is now streaming on Netflix .

Most Popular

You may also like.

• Entertainment
• Two Former Mr. Darcys Delight in Netflix Espionage Caper <i>Operation Mincemeat</i>

Two Former Mr. Darcys Delight in Netflix Espionage Caper Operation Mincemeat

E ven the most imaginative spy novelist couldn’t have made it up: In 1943 a motley group of British operatives created an elaborate false identity for a corpse, which they then sent awash on a beach in Spain, with the aim of throwing the Nazis off the trail of the Allies’ impending invasion of Sicily. This “credible courier,” carrying personal letters and accouterments as well as an all-important fake official document, did exactly as he was told—after all, he had no choice—and ultimately pulled off his mission with grand success, though not without a few nail-biting detours and near-misses. The top-secret plan was dubbed Operation Mincemeat , a suitable name for cobbled-together plot so humble that it could just possibly work.

Now a movie of the same name works a similar homegrown charm. Directed by John Madden—who may be best known for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love , a perfectly entertaining bonbon that has somehow become fashionable to deride— Operation Mincemeat , based on Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book, follows the twisting trail of the unwitting war hero Major William Martin, who began life as a decrepit body lingering in a morgue and now lives forever in espionage lore. Commander Ewen Montagu ( Colin Firth ) and Royal Air Force Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley ( Matthew Macfadyen ) hatch this farfetched plan but have trouble selling it to the higher-ups, for understandable reasons. It doesn’t help that their personal lives are something of a mess: Montagu is having marital troubles, and his wife has gone off to America with their children. Cholmondeley is shy and awkward—he’s interested in a young woman who works at their office, Jean Leslie (the always captivating Kelly Macdonald), though she doesn’t seem to return his affections—and he feels inferior to his brother, killed in the line of duty and lionized by the men’s grieving mother.

But their scheme eventually gets the go-ahead, and once they find a suitable stiff, they’re off. Jean is enlisted to help them invent a believable romantic backstory for Major Martin, and her involvement in the scheme creates an awkward love triangle: She develops a crush on Montagu, as Cholmondeley looks on mournfully, though he’s not above a rather cruel act of romantic sabotage. And the woman who holds the intelligence office together, Helen Leggett (Penelope Wilton), a model of efficiency, pens the love letter that’s eventually tucked into Major Martin’s breast pocket—a letter that points to her own experience of lost love in a previous war, an eloquent touch that’s purely moving rather than sentimental.

Aside from the fact that Operation Mincemeat features not one but two former Mr. Darcys (one from the much-loved 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series, the other from Joe Wright ’s similarly marvelous 2005 film adaptation), and works beautifully as a romance, it’s also a cracking espionage caper. Even as the deception was unfolding, its participants—especially a Naval intelligence officer, played here by Johnny Flynn, by the name of Ian Fleming—knew it would one day make a great story. The near-failure of Operation Mincemeat, which Madden and screenwriter Michelle Ashford render in tense, crisp detail, makes this story that much more remarkable, and this trim little movie, both funny and grand, does it justice. Major William Martin, God rest his soul, didn’t die for naught.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

More Must-Reads from TIME

• Javier Milei’s Radical Plan to Transform Argentina
• The New Face of Doctor Who
• How Private Donors Shape Birth-Control Choices
• What Happens if Trump Is Convicted ? Your Questions, Answered
• The Deadly Digital Frontiers at the Border
• Scientists Are Finding Out Just How Toxic Your Stuff Is
• The 31 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2024
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen Star in Shocking True Story With Heartbreaking Consequences

From John Madden, Operation Mincemeat beautifully mixes an unbelievable WWII mission with the equally entrancing lives of the people behind it.

“In any story, if it’s a good story, there is that which is seen and that which is hidden,” begins John Madden ’s intriguing and wonderfully-acted Operation Mincemeat . “This is especially true in stories of war. Operation Mincemeat proves this to be true with the almost unbelievable story of a World War II espionage operation that not only explores the audacity of this remarkable scenario, but the equally enthralling lives of those who made this undertaking a reality.

Operation Mincemeat follows British Intelligence as they attempt to hide the Allied’s invasion of Sicily in 1943. The plan involves taking the body of a dead man, dressing him up like a member of the Royal Marines, filling his pockets with correspondence that implies that the Allies’ upcoming attack on Sicily is a ruse, and then dropping him in the ocean for the Axis powers to find. Leading the plan are two intelligence officers—Ewen Montagu ( Colin Firth ) and Charles Cholmondeley ( Matthew Macfayden )—and a team that includes their head of section, Hester Leggett ( Penelope Wilton ), Jean Leslie ( Kelly Macdonald ), a secretary who works her way up to become an integral part of this plot, and an assistant and aspiring writer, Ian Fleming ( Johnny Flynn ).

Operation Mincemeat beautifully balances both what is seen and that which is hidden throughout. The machinations of this insane plan are truly remarkable, as this team has to make sure so many unlikely things happen in clockwork with each other to trick the Nazis. But even more captivating is the creation of an entirely new person for this operation to work. Montagu, Cholmondeley, and their entire team have to turn a long-dead body into Major William Martin, a man with intelligence on the Allies’ plans, but also, make him into a believable human being, with loves, wants, desires, and dreams.

RELATED: 2022 Summer Movie Preview: ‘Jurassic World Dominion,’ ‘Lightyear,’ ’Thor: Love and Thunder,’ and 35 More to Get Excited For

As Cholmondeley states in Operation Mincemeat , everyone seems to be a storyteller, and that’s precisely what this hidden tale investigates. Primarily, Montagu, Cholmondeley, and Leslie have to figure out who Major William Martin is, crafting a person out of thin air. This includes giving the man a believable love story that will further flesh out who this person was, helping sell the deception even more.

As these three start putting this life and love story together, the relationships of these three start to shift. Cholmondeley clearly has a thing for Leslie, while the married Montagu also takes a liking to Leslie, and the two form a questionable friendship that could mean more. With this triangle of sorts, we see the crippling loneliness that war can create, how even without being in battle, war can tear people apart, separate, and leave scars that never heal.

Firth is expectedly great in this mode, exploring the gray nature of Montagu, making him the biggest wild card of the three. His intentions with Leslie are always suspect, as his wife has moved to America during the war, and MI6’s uncertainty about whether Montagu’s brother ( Mark Gatiss ) is a community spy, makes Montagu a fascinating character to try and figure out.

But the audience’s sympathy almost entirely lies with Cholmondeley and Leslie. Macfayden clearly wants love and honor, but is willing to put others’ needs ahead of his own. He lives with his mother, who only wants her other son to come back from the war, ignoring the son who is avoiding living his life in order to take care of her. Macfayden beautifully plays Cholmondeley with a persistent level of melancholy, where even during his successes, there’s a seeming discontent that lies under the surface. Macdonald is equally as wonderful as Leslie, a widow who seeks companionship, even if she’s aware that it might not be good for herself or the other person. Again, it’s that loneliness that seeps in during war that permeates every element of Operation Mincemeat ’s incredible story.

Amongst all of this is the story of a young Ian Fleming, working with British Intelligence, and clearly gathering information for what will eventually be James Bond. Even with all these other stories intersecting and intertwining, screenwriter Michelle Ashford ( Masters of Sex , The Pacific ) is able to throw in little Easter eggs that seem like inspiration for the young writer. One character calling another “M,” or a watch that also works as a buzzsaw are all fun added elements that hint at details we’ll be seeing in spy stories for decades to come.

Ashford’s screenplay and Madden’s excellent direction all manage to take what could’ve easily been a fairly standard historical war drama and turn it into something more intricate, layered, and surprisingly powerful. Madden and Ashford make Operation Mincemeat mix a shocking true story with a frequently heartbreaking story about the large toll war takes, even on those who aren’t on the frontlines.

Operation Mincemeat is available to stream on Netflix now.

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Real-Life Heroes on YouTube for Tweens and Teens

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Operation mincemeat, common sense media reviewers.

Incredible WWII true story has disturbing scenes, smoking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie celebrates British eccentricity, but ben

Both Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu work to

There are two important female characters in the l

World War II bubbles underneath the entire story,

Two characters are seen making out against a wall.

There are a couple of uses of the word "f--k." Als

Near non-stop smoking as nearly every character sm

Parents need to know that Operation Mincemeat is a British World War II drama based on an extraordinary true story, with questionable behavior for the greater good, dead bodies, and smoking. The almost unbelievable story involves two British intelligence officers -- Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles…

Positive Messages

The movie celebrates British eccentricity, but beneath that a resilience and courage. An overwhelming determination to defeat the common enemy and put an end to Nazism, even if the route to doing so brings the worst out in some.

Positive Role Models

Both Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu work together and display great bravery, the former even putting himself in precarious situations in the name of honor. The characters are flawed. A married man develops feelings for another, while the main characters are willing to bribe a poor grieving woman to keep quiet about the fact they have used her brother's corpse without permission.

Diverse Representations

There are two important female characters in the leading quartet. But the key players are the men and it's also a predominantly White cast. However, the movie is based on real events and thus this representation reflects the story being told.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

World War II bubbles underneath the entire story, with a whole variety of characters grieving those they've lost in battle. The characters "choose" a corpse for their operation, with many seen, including a child's. The corpse they do use is shown frequently. An autopsy shows innards being pulled out of a stomach. Someone is threatened with death unless they divulge all information regarding the secret operation. Conflict including soldiers being shot and killed as they approach land from their boats.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two characters are seen making out against a wall. A character touches another's genitals in an attempt to gain vital information.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

There are a couple of uses of the word "f--k." Also heard are "bollocks," "bastard," "t-ts," and "arse."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Near non-stop smoking as nearly every character smokes. Characters drink alcohol frequently too, in bars, offices, and at home. A character declares that they "need" a drink, even though it's 8 a.m. One character drink drives.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Operation Mincemeat is a British World War II drama based on an extraordinary true story, with questionable behavior for the greater good, dead bodies, and smoking. The almost unbelievable story involves two British intelligence officers -- Ewen Montagu ( Colin Firth ) and Charles Cholmondeley ( Matthew Macfadyen ) -- using a corpse to distract the Nazis, allowing British troops to get to safety. The characters are flawed, and while very proud, dignified, and courageous, they resort to bribery and other dubious means. They also show little respect for the corpse they use for their plan and some scenes make for an uncomfortable watch, especially an autopsy scene. War and violence play in the background, with soldiers being shot at and killed. There is one scene where a straight man touches another man's genitals, to help move their operation along. There are a couple of uses of "f--k," as well as "bollocks" and "bastard." The smoking is non-stop, representative of the time period. There is much drinking too and one character is seen driving under the influence. The cast is not particular diverse, mostly made up of White males. But there are two leading roles belonging to women. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (5)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 5 parent reviews

Not successfull

Heads up about excessively suggestive sexual encounters and three f-words, what's the story.

OPERATION MINCEMEAT tells a remarkable true story of espionage and deception. With World War II ongoing, a major battle is on the horizon in Sicily, and it's one that will cost the British army countless lives. So two intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu ( Colin Firth ) and Charles Cholmondeley ( Matthew Macfadyen ), come up with a plan -- to divert the Germans to Greece, and allow the British soldiers onto shore with minimal obstruction. The plan is to ensure a planted corpse washes up on a beach containing fake documents. What could possibly go wrong?

Is It Any Good?

This drama -- based on real events -- is such a brilliantly cinematic story, it almost feels as if it would have been impossible to get wrong. That said, Operation Mincemeat still required an accomplished, deft hand to bring it to life, and do it the justice it deserves. Thankfully director John Madden more than delivers. Helped along by the great cast, with Macfadyen in particular stealing the show, the film moves seamlessly between different genres. Given it's a tale that is so enriched by its hard-to-believe elements, the filmmakers have used this as a platform to take a heightened take on proceedings.

The film has stories within the story, and celebrates the entire notion of artistic deception. And yet, it's remarkably more moving than anticipated, as the whole operation, despite being so bombastic, is tinged with a profound sadness. Not only for the man whose body they're literally using for their own gain, but for the ongoing war, highlighting the mad lengths people will go to in a desperate bid to overcome fascism. Perhaps the one downside is that, tonally, it could have been even more overstated -- something rarely said about films. The story is so inconceivable, it almost feels like the filmmakers could have reveled more in its comedic moments, instead opting to take a more serious approach.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the historical context of Operation Mincemeat . Did you know anything about this story? Can you believe it's based on real events? Has the film inspired you to learn more about WWII? How to talk to kids about violence, crime, and war.

How was drinking and smoking depicted in the film? Were they glamorized? How has our behavior when it comes to drinking and smoking changed from when the movie was set?

Talk about the behavior of Montagu and Cholmondeley. Would you describe them as positive role models ? Did you find anything they did questionable?

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 6, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : May 11, 2022
• Cast : Colin Firth , Matthew Macfadyen , Kelly Macdonald
• Director : John Madden
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History
• Character Strengths : Courage , Teamwork
• Run time : 128 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : strong language, some sexual content, brief war violence, disturbing images, and smoking
• Last updated : October 30, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Munich: The Edge of War

Darkest Hour

Best War Dramas

World war ii books for kids, related topics.

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Operation Mincemeat (2021)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

Accessibility Links

Operation Mincemeat review — Matthew Macfadyen steals the show in a pacey war thriller

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★★★☆ Ian Fleming, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, gets the best line in this true-life wartime thriller. While contemplating the nature of spycraft in 1943, Fleming (Johnny Flynn), who was then the personal assistant to the director of naval intelligence, describes the world of espionage as “a wilderness of mirrors in which the truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies”.

It could be a tagline for the movie, which stars the national treasure Colin Firth, is directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love ) and seems to be a pleasing home-grown drama about plucky British derring-do. Yet the film is most alive when exploring that central lies-for-truth paradox and describing a small cadre of eccentrics who orchestrate fantasy for the sake of reality and occasionally get

• Stranger Things Season 5
• Deadpool and Wolverine
• The Batman 2
• Spider-Man 4
• Yellowstone Season 6
• Fallout Season 2
• The Last of Us Season 2
• Entertainment

Operation Mincemeat review: A deceptively good WWII thriller

War films — or any movies based on historical events, for that matter — can be tricky. In most cases, the audience knows where events will ultimately lead, so the story needs to create drama and intrigue out of the material that isn’t well-known and let the characters and their relationships draw you into a particular chapter in history.

The Netflix film Operation Mincemeat faces exactly that sort of conundrum with its dramatization of the titular, secret plan by Allied forces to trick the Nazis and hide the 1943 invasion of Sicily in the lead-up to that landmark mission. We know the Allied forces eventually win the war, after all, but filmmaker John Madden’s feature still manages to manufacture plenty of compelling moments in telling the story of one of history’s greatest wartime acts of deception.

Directed by Madden ( Shakespeare in Love ) from a script penned by  The Pacific and  Masters of Sex screenwriter Michelle Ashford,  Operation Mincemeat is based on Ben Macintyre’s 2020 novel of the same name and chronicles the efforts of the small group of British military officers and their assistants who conceived and enacted a plan to make the Nazis believe Allied forces planned to invade Greece instead of Sicily — thereby diverting the German military away from Italy. To do so, the group crafted an elaborate ruse involving a corpse dressed like a high-ranking officer carrying official military correspondence being dropped in the ocean off the coast of Spain.

It was an audacious plan, certainly, and Madden’s film details many of the intricate details the team of espionage experts — which included James Bond author Ian Fleming — needed to not only account for, but go to alarming lengths to corroborate in order to stay ahead of their German counterparts.

• The School for Good and Evil review: Middling magic
• Operation Seawolf review: nice Nazis? No thanks!
• Amsterdam review: An exhausting, overlong conspiracy thriller

The cast of  Operation Mincemeat is led by Oscar-winner Colin Firth ( The King’s Speech ) as Naval intelligence officer and judge Ewen Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen ( Pride & Prejudice , Succession ) as MI5 agent Charles Cholmondeley, who are tasked with implementing Operation Mincemeat — named for the corpse that’s so integral to the plan. They’re joined by Kelly Macdonald ( No Country For Old Men ) as Jean Leslie, a woman working as an MI5 clerk who plays an important role in the deception, and Penelope Wilton ( Downton Abbey ) as Hester Leggett, Montagu’s most trusted assistant. The cast is filled out by Jason Isaacs and Johnny Flynn as Naval intelligence director John Godfrey and his assistant, Ian Fleming, respectively.

Operation Mincemeat is at its best when the story dives into the team’s efforts to outthink the Germans by not only giving them a corpse, but an entire, fabricated history for the deceased, homeless drifter they transformed into the fictional Capt. William Martin, officer of the Royal Marines. Their efforts to think several steps ahead of their counterparts and anticipate any element that would raise Nazi agents’ suspicion is fascinating, with Macfadyen’s portrayal of Cholmondeley channeling a detail-oriented obsession that makes him both painfully awkward and absolutely indispensable for the mission at hand.

The lengths to which the group goes to sell their ruse — and maintain the secret — keeps the story compelling, and watching the various members create and solidify the fictitious life of the dead officer at the crux of the operation adds another layer of intrigue and depth to the film.

Where Operation Mincemeat falters, however, is in its willingness to sideline the efforts of the group for a romantic subplot involving Montagu and Leslie, who — the story wants us to believe — find themselves becoming emotionally involved as a result of becoming too immersed in the fiction they’ve created for the soldier and the (equally fictional) woman he loves. Their relationship in the film feels like an entirely unnecessary plot thread that, at best, distracts from the otherwise captivating story of the mission, and at worst, cheapens their respective characters’ roles by turning them into star-crossed lovers who wandered into an espionage thriller.

Fortunately, the film’s insistence on seeing that romantic subplot through doesn’t entirely overshadow fine performances by the cast.

Firth and Macfadyen have an entertaining relationship that teeters on the brink of adversarial, but the film opts not to explore that well-worn trope. Their characters never seem to forget that the mission is more important than their personal squabbles, which isn’t the way these sorts of stories typically go. Rather than exploit the presence of Fleming in these real-world historical events, the film makes smart use of him as a supporting character, teasing some of the elements that would inspire his stories but keeping him at a distance, lest the specter of his later, famous works overshadow the characters and personalities at play in this particular moment of time.

While  Operation Mincemeat could have benefitted from more focus on the secret project in its title than the extraneous plot threads it pulls at, once you cut through all the romantic filler, the film still delivers an entertaining, effective dramatization of a particular moment in time that’s more deserving of attention.

Director John Madden’s Operation Mincemeat is available in theaters and on the Netflix streaming service .

Operation Mincemeat (2022)

Editors' recommendations.

• Like the Brad Pitt action movie Fury? Then watch these three great WWII movies on Netflix
• Decision to Leave review: An achingly romantic noir thriller
• Conversations with A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes review: killer’s words yield little insight
• Entergalactic review: a simple but charming animated romance
• Andor review: Rogue One prequel is slow-burn Star Wars
• Streaming Services

Animated adaptations of video games are in a surprisingly good place right now -- particularly on Netflix, where shows like Arcane, Castlevania, and even Carmen Sandiego have delivered rewarding extensions of their respective franchises. That continues with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which serves up a wild anime adventure set in the world of 2020's Cyberpunk 2077.

Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi (Gurren Lagann)  and Hiromi Wakabayashi (Star Wars: Visions), Cyberpunk: Edgerunners follows a teenage boy pulled into a dark world of high-tech mercenaries known as "Edgerunners." As he's drawn ever deeper into the world of body modification and corporate espionage, David (voiced by Zach Aguilar in the English version of the series) soon finds himself struggling to figure out what's truly important and where to draw the line when it comes to his cybernetic implants.

Steven Spielberg has spent his entire career channeling the heartache of his childhood into movies. He’s never really hesitated to admit as much, confessing publicly to the autobiographical elements woven through sensitive sensations like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Catch Me If You Can, and especially his now 40-year-old E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, an all-ages, all-time smash that welcomed the world into the melancholy of his broken home via the friendship between a sad, lonely kid and a new friend from the stars. By now, all of that baggage is inextricable from the mythology of Hollywood’s most beloved hitmaker: It’s conventional wisdom that Spielberg’s talent for replicating the awe and terror of childhood comes from the way that his own has continued to weigh, more than half a century later, on his heart and mind.

With his new coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans, Spielberg drops all but the barest pretense of artificial distance between his work and those experiences. Co-written with Tony Kushner, the great playwright who’s scripted some of the director’s recent forays into the American past (including last year’s luminous West Side Story), the film tells the very lightly fictionalized tale of an idealistic kid from a Jewish family, growing up in the American Southwest, falling in love with the cinema as his parents fall out of love with each other. Every scene of the film feels plucked from the nickelodeon of Spielberg’s memories. It’s the big-screen memoir as a twinkly-tragic spectacle of therapeutic exorcism.

Like the drawling Southern detective he has now placed at the center of two fabulously entertaining clockwork whodunits, Rian Johnson should not be underestimated. The writer, director, and blockbuster puzzle enthusiast has a gift for luring his audience onto ornately patterned rugs, then giving their edges a powerful yank. Glass Onion at first seems like a more straightforward, less elegant act of Agatha Christie homage than its predecessor, the murder-mystery sleeper Knives Out. But to assume you’ve gotten ahead of it, or seen every nature of trick Johnson has concealed under his sleeve, is to fall into the same trap as the potential culprits who dare trifle with the great Benoit Blanc (a joyfully re-invested Daniel Craig).

Anyone annoyed by the topical culture-war trappings of Knives Out (all that background MAGA chatter and drawing-room conversation on immigration policy) may be irked anew by how Glass Onion situates itself rather explicitly at the onset of COVID, with an opening series of introductions heavy on face wear and video chats. Even Johnson, first-rate showman that he is, can’t make these reminders of the recent, dismal past very funny.

Operation Mincemeat Review

Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat is a gift to storytellers. It’s a minor but significant chapter of World War II that would seem far-fetched if it wasn’t, in fact, actual history: yes, the British government did once take the corpse of a homeless man, dress him in an officer’s uniform, fill his pockets with fake documents (including a love letter from a fictitious sweetheart, complete with backstory) and hope to pull the wool over the Nazi’s eyes. It’s a tantalising premise that demonstrates the lengths the Allies were willing to go: high stakes, mixed with high farce.

John Madden ’s film nicely balances the ongoing grief and trauma of a brutal war with rich period details and even a modest sense of fun. When it really pops, the whole thing unfurls almost like a caper by way of Ealing Studios, as the team — led by three enjoyably dry turns from Colin Firth , Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald — meticulously plan out every eventuality, ad absurdum. (A scene where Firth attempts to photograph a corpse sitting upright is morbidly funny.)

This is a British film to its tea-soaked core.

That audacious tone is helped by the fun footnote that the operation was likely the brainchild of a young Ian Fleming ( Johnny Flynn ), whose taste for espionage would later fuel his James Bond novels, and understandably, the film can’t resist a few sly nods-and-winks to 007’s future.

But the crackling pace is somewhat interrupted by a soapy love triangle between the three leads, which feels slightly shoehorned in, with chemistry that never fully materialises. Perhaps it’s because every upper lip here is resolutely stiff: this is a British film to its tea-soaked core, and while that may lose it a bit of cinematic ambition (Madden also directed both Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, which hints at the target audience here), it is an undeniably rousing watch, even in its highest moments of drama: destined to become a Bank Holiday staple.

Related Articles

Movies | 05 10 2021

‘Operation Mincemeat’ explained: The stolen body and fake intelligence that helped win WWII

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

The Allied victory in World War II hinged on many complex factors, but one of the most unlikely turning points involved the dead body of a Welsh homeless man. In 1943, British intelligence acquired the corpse of Glyndwr Michael from a morgue and dressed him up as a fictitious officer named William Martin, planting fake documents in his clothes to suggest that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily.

The idea, a notable example of tactical deception, was to trick Hitler into moving his forces so the Allies could regain control of Europe. It was dubbed Operation Mincemeat — a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that they were using a dead body — and this largely unknown spy operation is now the subject of a Netflix film of the same name.

The film, directed by John Madden and written by Michelle Ashford, is based on Ben Macintyre’s expansive 2010 book “Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II.”

“The story of Operation Mincemeat is true,” explains Macintyre, who was involved in the process of making the film. “Very rarely does spying make much of a difference, but Operation Mincemeat made an enormous difference. And without it — you can’t calculate it — but many, many more lives would have been lost on Sicily’s beaches, including many American lives.”

The 007 connection

The inspiration for the operation dates back to 1939, when British intelligence put together the Trout Memo, a list of 54 possible ideas for how they could fool the enemy. The person responsible for the Trout Memo was none other than James Bond novelist Ian Fleming, then a lieutenant commander. Macintyre says Fleming’s involvement in the operation was “one of the most extraordinary discoveries of this story.”

“Ian Fleming was at that point assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, Adm. Sir John Godfrey, who would become the model for M in the ‘James Bond’ stories,” Macintyre explains. “One of the things that Fleming did was to draw up, with Godfrey, a memo called the Trout Memo, [which is] now quite famous in intelligence studies.

“One of these ideas, No. 28, was the kernel of this idea, which was to get a dead body and to make it look as if it was an airman who had drowned at sea and equip it with false papers and ship it somewhere. He got the idea from a novel by a man no one ever reads these days called Basil Thomson, who was a pretty dreadful prewar novelist. I love the idea that it comes from a novel and it’s picked up by another novelist.”

It was that meta aspect of the story that most attracted Madden. “They took a fictional idea and tried their very best to make it into an idea that appeared to be absolutely real,” the director adds. “Which then was in danger of being exposed as a fiction and so on. The layers of that. Something immensely attractive about it was this whole thing about writing, about the creation of fiction, and how closely that is allied with espionage.”

Ashford’s screenplay, which was in the works for several years before the film was made, introduces Fleming, played by Johnny Flynn, as the story’s narrator. In a coincidental parallel, Ashford modeled the structure of the screenplay off Madden’s 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love,” taking inspiration from how both stories are about the creation of a fiction that ultimately turns the creators’ lives upside down.

The love triangle

Operation Mincemeat was led by Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) with the help of Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen). The pair borrowed a photograph — now in England’s National Archives — from MI5 secretary Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald) to plant on their fake captain. In the film, Montagu, who was married, becomes involved in an affair with Leslie, which prompts jealousy in Cholmondeley. In reality, it’s uncertain if that affair really happened or whether Cholmondeley had feelings for Leslie.

According to Ashford, it is true that Montagu and Leslie wrote each other a series of letters as fictitious characters and they did sometimes go out. It didn’t feel like a stretch to introduce a love triangle.

“It was a two-hander that I turned into a three-hander,” Ashford explains. “When I ran this up the flagpole, everyone said, ‘That makes sense. That doesn’t feel like a violation of the story.’ Because here’s the thing: We don’t know it didn’t happen. We don’t know that Cholmondeley didn’t have a crush on Jean.”

Macintyre says the affair between Leslie and Montagu has a “decent chance of being true.” The author interviewed Leslie before her death in 2012, but the former secretary refused to acknowledge what had transpired after hours at work.

“She just said, ‘I’m not talking about that anymore. That was a long time ago,’” Macintyre recalls. “In a way that said to me, I think they probably did have an affair, but she doesn’t want to say it. So that element of [the story] has been given a life that we’ll never really know how true it was to life. But that seems, to me, to be perfectly reasonable inside the story like this.”

Adding family ties

Ashford dramatized a few other small elements of “Operation Mincemeat,” including a scene where Glyndwr Michael’s sister is told about his death. The sister character is an invention to help convey that Michael wasn’t simply a prop in a spy mission; he was a real man.

“[It was important] to really try and find in the movie the messiness of war,” Ashford notes. “The fact that they need to do this, but there’s consequences if you just steal a person and stuff them in a life jacket and throw them in the water. I loved that part of the story because I found it complicated and poignant and curious. The sister showing up was a fictionalized element of the story. But he had some family, somewhere. So to make that person appear [is] representative of the fact that that guy came from somewhere.”

The stolen body

While the U.K. government had some freedom to carry out espionage missions behind closed doors, fundamentally Operation Mincemeat was not legal. The intelligence officers colluded with a coroner named Bentley Purchase and took the body from a morgue. After his body was recovered in Spain and the false documents in his pocket made their way into German hands, Michael was buried with military honors as Maj. William Martin.

In Montagu’s 1953 book “The Man Who Never Was” (which was made into a well regarded 1956 movie of the same name with Clifton Webb), the officer claims the government was given permission to use the body and attributes the death to pneumonia. But it wasn’t until 1996 that Michael’s true identity was revealed, and an inscription was added to his tombstone in 1998.

“Basically, they just lifted the body,” Macintyre says. “They believed that nobody would claim it. They believed he had no family. They were wrong about that. They just thought they could get away with stealing the body. It’s as simple as that.”

“The whole thing is macabre and absurd. But one of the reasons the film works so well, I think, is there is a kind of absurd element to it. And that is very true to life. Because the reality is that Montagu and Cholmondeley and the other people involved in this, they were fully aware that there was something ridiculous about what they were doing, which is what gives the film great tension.”

He adds, “It began as a caper. ‘Let’s see if we can hoodwink the enemy.’ But as it went on, they began to realize that they were dealing with incredibly high stakes. If it went wrong, not only were they not going to fool Hitler; they might end up actually sending thousands of people to their deaths.”

For Madden, it was useful to have these emotional, human undercurrents in the film because it might be easy to get bogged down in technical detail. The filmmaker felt that while some of the movie required fictional aspects, everything felt true to the essence of the narrative, as well as to the spy genre itself.

“The story is about speculation,” Madden says. “That’s what an espionage story is about. It’s about guesswork. It’s about hunches. It’s about filling in the gaps. That’s exactly what [the officers] are doing with the fiction they’re creating in the story and hoping that there are no gaps. But, of course, you’re left guessing, even when you’ve covered every single base. The story’s about the creation of a fiction, [and] we were creating our own fiction of this set of events, which themselves are not totally definitive. Because there’s a point where historical research won’t get you any further, and you just have to speculate.”

The historical impact

Looking back, Operation Mincemeat was of monumental importance in shaping the outcome of World War II. While it’s not well known and isn’t typically taught in history classes, the events had a significant impact.

“Europe was just locked down by Hitler and the Germans,” Ashford explains. “[The Allies] were looking at Europe going, ‘How the hell are we going to get in there?’ It was a massive, massive job. And without breaking into Europe and starting to make inroads there, we were going to lose. We were dead. The only way to get in there was to come up through Sicily, and everybody knew it, including the Germans. So how were they going to convince the Germans that’s not what they were doing? So it had made an enormous difference in the war. To say ‘change the course of the war’ is not an overstatement.”

“The idea of planting a false story with the enemy is as old as war — that goes back to the Trojan Horse,” Macintyre adds. “But there’s little doubt that this was the most spectacular military deception ever carried out. It was spectacularly successful. And, of course, it raised the bar thereafter because it meant that all intelligence operations are always looking to see whether they’re being duped.”

More to Read

How accurate is a new movie about the real-life spies who inspired Bond? We checked

April 19, 2024

Review: Long before Bond, ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ kicked off British covert ops

April 18, 2024

James Bond’s creator lived a life to rival the spy’s

April 4, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Someone asked Jennifer Lopez about those Ben Affleck divorce rumors. It got awkward fast

May 23, 2024

Women and people of color drive ratings for streaming films, UCLA diversity report finds

Commentary: The kids are all right. It’s the adults who are trouble

May 22, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

Nina Dobrev hospitalized after e-bike accident; says a ‘long road of recovery’ awaits

May 21, 2024

Operation Mincemeat Review: A Love Letter to Spy Fiction on Netflix

Operation Mincemeat has a stellar cast and a polished production, but its at its best when exploring the relationship between fiction and espionage.

The best spy novels are often written by spies themselves (John le Carre, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Joe Weisberg, and so on). This is more than just a case of the old adage 'write what you know,' because the life of a spy is inevitably intertwined with the creation of fiction itself. The best spy novelists were undoubtedly good spies because they could create false but believable schemes and stories, convincing the enemy of a meticulously crafted deception, drawing on their imagination for the use of subterfuge.

Operation Mincemeat , a new film from Netflix , is at its best when exploring this fascinating dynamic. The movie certainly concerns itself with the titular spy operation developed by British intelligence during World War 2 , along with a touch of romance, and does so with great acting, beautiful production design, and some careful plotting. Nonetheless, Operation Mincemeat is actually about the relationship between fiction and the reality of war, the spy and the person beneath him.

Operation Mincemeat is Fiction About Reality and Vice Versa

Its very opening informs viewers of this, identifying that Operation Mincemeat is in many ways a meditation on storytelling itself, and about the fiction beneath reality (and vice versa). "In any story, if it's a good story, there is that which is seen and that which is hidden. This is especially true in stories of war. There is the war we see, a contest of bomb and bullets," the sparingly used but important voiceover narration begins. "But alongside this war, another war is waged, a battleground of shades of gray played out in seduction, deception, and bad faith. The participants are strange; they are seldom what they seem, and fiction and reality blur."

It's not spoiling anything to reveal that these words are narrated (as they're birthed by the click-clack of a typewriter) by Ian Fleming, the author behind agent 007 and responsible for the many James Bond movies . Fleming was a part of the actual Operation Mincemeat in 1943, and the film finds him watching on curiously, the wheels within the author's mind visibly turning. He isn't the only master of fiction amongst the array of spies, secretaries, and secret agents in Operation Mincemeat . In fact, the main characters spend the film essentially creating fiction, except this storytelling will save thousands of lives.

Related: These Are the Most Realistic Spy Movies of All Time

An early scene in Operation Mincemeat finds intelligence officer Ewen Montagu reading aloud to his son from one of the great spy novels (and Alfred Hitchcock films), The 39 Steps , which arguably birthed the modern espionage thriller. Montagu is developing a deception operation alongside Charles Cholmondeley at the same time that Allied forces were planning to attack the Nazis through Sicily, which was heavily reinforced by the German military at the time. Montagu and his team hoped to create a ruse which would convince the Nazi military that the Allied forces were instead planning to attack through Greece and Sardinia, in order to draw the Germans away from Sicily to make safe space for the proper invasion.

The 'True' Story of Operation Mincemeat and WW2

To do this, a plan was developed which depended on a carefully formulated fiction, as much as it did on the dumb luck of happenstance and cunning spy-work. The deception involved having the corpse of a military officer with confidential intelligence wash up on the shores of neutral Spain and be intercepted by the Nazis; the corpse would carry information pertaining to the Allied invasion through Greece. Of course, this was all a feint - everything was staged, from the false documents to the actual British officer. Instead, the intelligence officers found a drowned body and constructed a detailed fictional backstory for the man to make him seem like a legitimate officer with accurate information.

To do this, the British team basically formed a writers room, pitching ideas and speculating as to who this fictional officer was. The best parts of Operation Mincemeat are the extended scenes in which Montagu and Jean Leslie, a woman on his team, tap into their extensive knowledge of and passion for spy fiction to workshop ideas together. They huddle together in the bars of wartime England and walk the streets darkened by curfews and blackouts, discussing who this fictional soldier they're inventing for espionage is — who his family is, what his mission was, and who he fell in love with.

Related: Best British War Films Set in the 20th Century

The most romantic aspects of the film find Montagu and Leslie combining their shared intelligence (of spying and spy fiction) to concoct this story, almost flirtatiously inserting themselves as the fictional characters they're creating. Operation Mincemeat does this without being a meta movie , remaining a traditionally scripted film throughout, but it's a unique delight to see fictional characters so invested and interested in fictional characters of their own making. This is a spy film that loves spy fiction.

The Cast and Crew of Operation Mincemeat

Outside this neat approach, Operation Mincemeat is a rather by-the-numbers film. It's efficiently scripted by Michelle Ashford, who specializes in period dramas (writing for The Pacific and developing Masters of Sex ) and directed with the typical (but rather bland) polish of John Madden. Madden's films could benefit from a bit of the excitement of his namesake in the NFL, the ebullient and boisterous late coach John Madden; while his Exotic Marigold Hotel films, The Debt, Miss Sloane , and Shakespeare in Love are all good enough films, his work is often somewhat dull in its strict adherence to conventional filmmaking, and nothing is different here.

The acting is excellent throughout, though, with Kelly Macdonald and Colin Firth's performances (as Leslie and Montagu, respectively) standing out despite a somewhat cloistered, stiff-upper-lip British setting. Matthew Macfayden is also very good as Charles, excellent in his displays of both wounded pride and barely containable passion. It should be really fun seeing him play John Stonehouse in the upcoming espionage miniseries .

Operation Mincemeat is a very polished production, with everything looking great — the film somehow seems bigger than it actually is, feeling like an epic British war movie when it in actuality takes place in mostly small, cramped spaces. The story itself is one of those stranger-than-fiction moments in espionage and military history, akin to Argo , where it'd be largely unbelievable if it wasn't true.

This itself proves part of the point of Operation Mincemeat , that fiction is utterly necessary. It's important not just for individuals to find hope and thrive in a painful world, but for military victory and for history itself. They say that 'life imitates art,' but it's really a lot more symbiotic than that; life imitates art imitating life imitating art, and reality depends upon fiction as much as the inverse is true. That's the best thing about Operation Mincemeat , and might give audiences a better appreciation for the fiction (such as James Bond) that they consume so regularly. Operation Mincemeat is now streaming on Netflix.

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

• DVD & Streaming

Operation Mincemeat

Content caution.

In Theaters

• Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu; Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley; Kelly Macdonald as Jean Leslie; Penelope Wilton as Hester Leggett; Jason Isaacs as Admiral John Godfrey; Rufus Wright as Lt. Bill Jewell; Ruby Bentall as Connie Bukes; Charlotte Hamblin as Patricia Trehearne; Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming; Lorne MacFadyen as Sgt. Roger Dearborn; Mark Gatiss as Ivor Montagu; Hattie Morahan as Iris Montagu; Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill; Alex Jennings as John Masterman

Home Release Date

• May 11, 2022
• John Madden

Distributor

Movie review.

In war, death is as common as a breath of air. Bullets whiz, explosions light up the landscape and bodies collapse to the ground. Young men push their way through the unimaginable to claim mere inches of soil.

But behind the scenes, another war is raging—a war of whispers. And this war is not won through good aim or a quick trigger finger. It’s won through deception, codebreakers and mental strategy. What’s more, this behind-the-scenes battle will directly affect the outcome of its bloodier counterpart.

That’s why Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley are desperately working on Operation Mincemeat, a plan they hope will change, and help win, World War II. They know that Winston Churchill is planning to send British troops to storm the beaches of Sicily to march towards Rome and knock Italy out of the war. They also know that for that plan to not be a total slaughter of young British soldiers, they need to fool the German troops into moving their stationed men out of the country under the impression that the British are attacking elsewhere.

How will Ewen and Charles manage that deception? Well, it’s a bit of a long shot, but it’s the best they’ve got: They’ll dress up a recently deceased corpse as a decorated British officer—Major William Martin, they’ll call him—and a fake letter regarding non-existent plans to invade Greece. Then, they’ll drop the body off the coast of Spain and hope the neutral country delivers the documents straight to the office of the Führer himself.

The strategy has so many holes that it’ll take a miracle for it to work. According to Churchill, however, it’s just what they need.

“The plan is risky,” Churchill says. “It’s also highly implausible. Meaning that all the reasons it shouldn’t work are the same reasons the Germans might believe it’s true.”

Positive Elements

Early in the film, Ewen is forced to send his wife, Iris, and children to live in America for their protection because Iris is Jewish. However, Ewen hints that Iris will likely never return because she wants a divorce. Though Iris says that marriages change, and romance and love belong to the young, Ewen says that he doesn’t believe that statement. Instead, he wants to sacrifice for her happiness—even at the expense of his own.

The mission itself, of course, is designed to foil the hopes and dreams of World War II’s European Axis powers of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. While war is often a murky business, few would argue that this war was as justified as war can be. And certainly, the goal of saving British lives is a worthy one, as well.

Admittedly, the plan involved the morally dubious use of a man’s corpse. In real life, the corpse was known only by its fake name (Major William Martin) for 50 years. It was not until 1996 that his identity was recognized—Glyndwr Michael. And, in a nice real-world turn, the British Government honored Glyndwr in 1997 by adding an epitaph to his tombstone recognizing him by his name.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Though the movie does not fully explore it, it does give a nod to the German people who actively resisted Hitler and the Nazi regime as “Hitler’s favorite intelligence analyst,” Alexis von Roenne, intentionally approves the deceptive documents. Like the other characters in the story, von Roenne was a real person, working for Germany’s military-intelligence service known as the Abwehr. He was also secretly working against the Nazis because he felt that the Nazi Party ran against his beliefs as a Christian. During his life, he misled Hitler to assist the Allies secretly, including with Operation Mincemeat. Eventually, von Roenne was arrested in connection to conspirators of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. He would later be found guilty and executed.

Spiritual Elements

Hester, a woman who works with Ewen and Charles, begins to pray, causing others to join in. In creating a fake life for their corpse, Jean, another woman who works with the two, says that William’s mother was a devout Catholic. Jean says that she wants to “say a prayer to St. Jude.” Jean talks about the grace of God.

Ewen says his wife Iris is “wiser than Solomon, stronger than Samson and more patient than Job.” Ewen creates a fictional girlfriend for William and says that she’s a “demon on the dance floor.” Ewen says that he doesn’t need to be reminded of his sins. Charles quotes 1 Cor. 15:52 over the corpse as they drop it into the ocean.

A couple of characters perform the sign of the cross. A nurse tells someone that God forgives them. Someone says “Godspeed” and “May God forgive us all.” A soldier mentions that he left his Bible below deck. A Spanish priest says, “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.”

Sexual Content

A man and a woman kiss one another passionately in order to hide the fact that they are listening in on a private conversation, and the woman moans. A male spy is forced to stimulate the clothed genitals of another man in order to gain information, and the man is heard moaning. The corpse is seen naked on a coroner’s operating table, though no explicit parts can be seen.

Ewen hints that Iris wants a divorce. Various people greet and bid farewell with kisses on the cheek. A man is called a “skirt chaser.”

Both Ewen and Charles have obvious interests in Jean, and Jean has a fondness for Ewen, who is still married (though he believes he will never see his wife again). Ewen and Jean intentionally spend extra time than needed with one another, and there is occasional romantic tension between the two.

Violent Content

Ewen forcefully grabs Charles in a confrontation. Soldiers are shot and killed or hit by explosions in a battle, though there is little actual blood seen. Hitler shatters a glass in anger.

Charles’ brother is said to have been killed in war. Jean references that her husband died. A man is said to have committed suicide by ingesting rat poison. Off-screen, a child finds an unexploded firebomb.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used three times. “A–,” “b–tard,” “h—” and “d–n” are all used sparingly. The British slurs “bloody” and “bollocks” are used occasionally, and crude references to breasts and male genitals are made. God’s name is misused nine times, and Jesus’ name is inappropriately used three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Various characters casually drink alcohol and smoke cigars and cigarettes throughout the film. One character is said to be on his sixth drink and is visibly impaired.

Other Negative Elements

A drunk man drives recklessly. A coroner visibly removes the innards of an extremely bloated corpse, causing a man to vomit. Ewen and Charles both state that they might vomit. Ewen and Charles visit various morgues for corpses to use: Some cadavers are shown on screen, and one is a child. While Ewen and Charles look at one off-screen corpse, they ask where its legs are. When they find a suitable corpse, they attempt to take photos of it as if it were alive.

As soldiers dodge bullets on the front lines, men and women work fervently in the background to ensure those bloody battles can be mitigated at all costs.

Codebreakers such as Alan Turing decipher daily the plans of Axis troops. Strategists create, scrap and recreate countless plans in anticipation of expected Axis movements like a macabre dance of game theory. And Ewen and Charles, two military men in intelligence work, are putting together what some consider to be the strangest military operation that the British have ever conceived.

The complications which could arise from such a plan were countless. What if Spain gives the British authorities the papers back before Germany gets to read them? What if the ocean water causes the ink on the documents to fade away? What if the corpse doesn’t even float to Spain?

It’s a plan so fantastical that it could cause viewers to think the movie’s plot absolutely ridiculous—if it hadn’t actually happened in real life. And while Operation Mincemeat was a real plan, what moviegoers may find even more fantastical is that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, helped work on the project. In fact, many of his ideas for James Bond were a direct result of working within the Naval Intelligence Division. According to Fleming, Bond “was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war.”

Though set during World War II, little violence appears on screen apart from a single scene of soldiers in combat. Instead, the film focuses on those working in the background—and it offers a romantic subplot which feels somewhat misplaced within the film itself. Viewers should be aware of a couple sexual scenes (noted in our Sexual Content section). People frequently smoke and drink, and crude language is sometimes heard.

Operation Mincemeat features a side of war that typically doesn’t make the big screen—the planning and strategy side. We won’t be following a unit of soldiers as they make their way behind enemy lines and bond in their brotherhood. As Operation Mincemeat shows us, sometimes there’s more than one way to save private Ryan—through intelligence officers preventing the slaughter to begin with. It’s these secretive heroes who the film focuses on, providing not only praise for the operatives and their plan but also paying respect to the person whose corpse they used to accomplish it.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

Latest Reviews

The Garfield Movie

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Weekly Reviews Straight to your Inbox!

Screen Rant

Operation mincemeat review: colin firth war drama is diverting & forgettable.

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

This 2024 Horror Movie Is A Very Good Sign For Reboot Of $403M Franchise Coming Next Year

All 6 denzel washington villain roles, ranked worst to best, why the emperor gave arrakis to the atreides in dune.

At a time when the latest Marvel movie will be stomping its way through the box office, turning on  Operation Mincemeat  —  the kind of star-studded, adult-oriented, mid-range drama that studios don't often greenlight anymore — might feel like an act of resistance. While British audiences have the option of buying a ticket for it instead of  Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness , most American viewers will have to be content with queueing it up at home, but thinking about the viewing experience in those oppositional terms might actually help it. On its own, it's unlikely to inspire strong, polarized responses.  Operation Mincemeat  is a solid movie, the only reasonable reactions to which are mild. A small smile and a nod of approval on one end of the spectrum, a tilt of the head and a dismissive shrug on the other. Someone watching it out of a desire to comment on the entertainment industry, and seeing themselves as part of a community of likeminded rebels, might be the only chance it has at making any sustainable impact on their psyche.

Based on a genuine World War II military undertaking, director John Madden's  Operation Mincemeat  tells the story of how British Military Intelligence convinced Nazi Germany that the Allies were planning to invade Greece instead of Sicily by loading up a corpse with fake documents and beaching it on the Spanish coast. The two in charge of leading the so-crazy-it-just-might-work scheme are Colin Firth's Ewen Montagu, a Naval officer who accepts the assignment after his wife and children flee to America, and Matthew Macfadyen's Charles Cholmondeley, a lonely bachelor eager to step out from beneath the shadow of his recently fallen, war-hero brother. They team up with Penelope Winton's Hester Leggett, Kelly Macdonald's Jean Leslie, and Johnny Flynn's ( future James Bond creator) Ian Fleming, with Jason Isaacs playing John Godfrey, the skeptical Director of Naval Intelligence eager to shut the initiative down.

Related:  The Takedown Review: Charismatic Actors Do Heavy Lifting In French Actioner

As expected, Operation Mincemeat 's collection of British talent is its greatest asset, but the film is too content to coast on watching them do their thing. The story (perhaps surprisingly) doesn't lend itself to a lot of action, and while the actors are game to create compelling, character-based drama, the script gives them little to play with. The crux is a pseudo-love triangle that forms between Ewen, Jean, and Charles, but despite Macfadyen's best efforts as the jealous admirer, it doesn't prove especially compelling. A subplot about a potential traitor in their midst feels equally toothless and the reason for both might be the movie's tone. Until the operation is actually executed (a section that picks up quite nicely), Madden barely entertains the idea that things could go wrong, which makes it difficult to take any of the narrative beats seriously.

Still, even if those sequences in Spain will make viewers wonder why the whole movie wasn't set there, it does enough to keep their attention. It will even tap that familiar well of emotion for the story's inevitable conclusion. This sense of being passable extends to the film's visuals and themes as well, which seem intent on capturing what people love about a good spy story. Much is made about everyone in the Intelligence community writing or wanting to write a spy novel, which rhymes nicely with the operation itself, which involves building a fictional life for the corpse from scratch. The cinematography does its part by occasionally using street lamps to create spots of light framed by fields of darkness, but the movie is far from styled like an espionage thriller. For the most part, it sports the look of the standard biopic.

The contrast between this and the romanticized visions of the characters feels intentional, but exactly what is intended is unclear. Take, for example, the decision to frame this as a soft-origin story for Bond, to which transparent references are made throughout. Is this designed to highlight the non-Bondness of Madden's film, and thereby celebrate the mundane, life-saving reality of MI5 ? Is it to frame plans like Operation Mincemeat as how the creatively inclined contributed to the war effort with maximum impact? Is it more critically minded, rapping a flashy blockbuster franchise on the knuckles for distorting the truth? Instead, it plays like the movie aggressively winking at the audience and the ultimate effect of treating these references like cameos pulls  Operation Mincemeat  closer to a Marvel movie than one ever imagined it could get. Maybe watching it isn't such a revolutionary act, after all.

Next:  Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness Review: Raimi Makes The MCU Genuinely Scary

Operation Mincemeat   released in limited US theaters on May 6 and is streaming on Netflix as of May 11. The film is 128 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual content, brief war violence, and smoking.

Our Rating:

• Movie Reviews
• 2.5 star movies

• Reading Lists
• New Nonfiction
• Awards/Festivals
• Daily Thrill
• Noir/Hardboiled
• Espionage/Thriller
• Legal/Procedural
• Literary Hub

Several Observations Regarding The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Olivia rutigliano has a few questions for guy ritchie.

It’s that time of year again. There’s a new Guy Ritchie film in theaters. Last year, I went to the movies and experienced the soul-warming balm of the nearly-incoherent heist movie Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre , and this year, I wanted to experience that again.

So, I took myself to see Ritchie’s new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare , which seemed like it would be a heist story set during World War II.  When the movie began, a title card flashed that said the film was based on true events, and I was like, right, it’s based on the factual event of World War II. But I wasn’t open-minded enough. Turns out, the film is specifically based on a real-life and very cockamamie WWII mission called “Operation Postmaster” that was only declassified in 2016. Upon learning that, I wondered for a moment why Ritchie had not called the film “Operation Postmaster,” but then I remembered that his movie last year was called “Operation Fortune,” and it’s a known fact that you can’t have two operations so close together.

Speaking of which… I was surprised to hear about the existence of “Operation Postmaster” because of that very rule! The British are already known for an absolutely bananas, top-secret WWII mission to turn the tide of the war: Operation Mincemeat. I have read the book Operation Mincemeat , seen the movie Operation Mincemeat , and seen the West End stage musical Operation Mincemeat , and I thought that this was the only absolutely insane, t0tally confidential war operation that the British had pulled off. But no, turns out there’s another one, too. And that’s the one this movie is about. Clearly, the educational merits of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are manifold.

I was surprised to learn anything from this movie because, truthfully, I’ve never learned anything from a mid-career Guy Ritchie movie besides the fact that I really like a movie in which bad guys carrying guns have slower reaction times than the good guy who is carrying just one knife. I like a movie about a heist team made up of several hulking, wisecracking men and a single cool woman! I like a movie where something goes wrong with the plan that a crew has meticulously worked out to the very last detail and now they have to improvise a whole new plan and it works anyway. I want a large body count provided by the same stuntmen over and over and you can actually tell, you’re like “oh that’s the guy who got nailed with the fishhook in the opening” or whatever. I like a movie where people are so British, they can barely speak English. I like a movie with a cast that includes Cary Elwes. I like all this, and Guy Ritchie has never not given it all to me.

What is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare about? It almost doesn’t matter! But I’ll explain anyway. Henry Cavill plays G.H. “Gus” March-Phillips, a military officer of some kind who’s currently serving jail time because he doesn’t play by the rules. This is great news. I also love a movie in which no one follows the rules. If someone follows the rules, I will walk out.

Anyway, Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear, only I didn’t realize that he was supposed to be Winston Churchill for like 2/3rds of the movie because he doesn’t look or sound like Winston Churchill and why would you cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill?) and Cary Elwes, who plays a military commander they call “M,” want March-Phillips to lead a secret, unofficial, unsanctioned, and illegal renegade mission. It’s very cool. He has to take a crew down to the Atlantic-side African island of Fernando Po, where the Nazis are keeping a giant ship that they use to store all their equipment to maintain the U-boats which patrol the Atlantic Ocean. The plethora of U-boats has been preventing American ships from bringing aid to Britain and the Allies. So, if March-Phillips blows up that ship, the Brits will basically stymie the Nazi control over the Atlantic. Sounds like a plan!

March-Phillips says he’s down to help, but he needs a badass crew. He has a few guys in mind: an Irish firearms virtuoso who hates the Nazis (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), an explosives weirdo (Henry Golding), a Swedish one-man-killing-machine (Alan Ritchson), and his best friend, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), I guess because they’re best friends. So, the British government is like, hm okay, we’ll let you include these guys as long as you add to your team 1.) this really cool agent (Babs Olusanmokun) who has set up a contact in Fernando Po already, and 2.) a very sexy woman (Eiza Gonzalez) who knows how to do everything and who will have a million costume changes despite traveling with only one small valise. March-Phillips is like, you drive a hard bargain, but you’ve got a deal.

So then, yeah, they all go to Fernando Po and pull off the mission. Eventually, March-Phillips recruits another cool guy, Kambili “Billy” Kalu ( Danny Sapani), who has his own crew of cool guys, and they all join in together. There are snags that require some fancy-footwork, and a Nazi or two that Eiza Gonzalez has to seduce, but they all overcome all these obstacles. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem that hard.

And that’s it, that’s the whole movie. There is no complicated multi-act structure. There are no sophisticated themes. There is absolutely no character development. And that’s fine! Who needs character development? This is a movie about several tough men and a very cool woman who go on a journey to kill Nazis and sabotage their large-scale plans for World Domination. I fail to see how anyone could develop character beyond that, anyway! And sure, sometimes the action scenes are a little confusing, like it’s hard to know where the characters are, exactly, in relation to each other. But you know what, that’s also fine! They know! The characters know. When I watch a Guy Ritchie movie, I’m not going to backseat drive. I know we’re going to get where we’re supposed to go and I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. Everyone involved appears to be having a bloody great time, and so am I. The only thing that would have made this movie more enjoyable is if I were also eating an entire family-size bag of Doritos.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a chipper extravaganza of nonsense black-ops, a jolly-diverting entrant in the canon of “Nazi killing” movies. It’s like if The Dirty Dozen weren’t gritty or unhinged. Actually, it is a great movie for people who wanted to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds but were worried that it might be too shocking and bloody.

And, you know what? I learned stuff from this movie. One thing I’ll say seriously is that we as a country are not taught enough about the Nazi occupation of Africa and this movie reminded me to go do more research on that topic. But, and I’m returning to being unserious now, perhaps the thing I learned the most from The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare  is that the guys who ran MI5 or whatever during the 1940s probably had the same psychological profile as Guy Ritchie—a flair for dramatic narrative and a devil-may-care attitude about the finer points of execution. It all checks out.

Overall, I had a great time. I do have a few questions, though. I’ve laid them out as follows.

• There are a million scenes of people being obsessed with their gold cigarette lighters. British brigadiers, scrappy agents, Nazi scum… they’re all yanking out and flicking open their cigarette lighters, even when no one is lighting anything. Why is that?
• Honestly, “Rory Kinnear” is an even weirder cast because (while he’s a talented actor and deserves widespread recognition), he’s not famous enough for this to be some fun, forgivable stunt casting.
• You know who they should have cast, if they wanted to do stunt casting for Winston Churchill? Mike Myers. I think that would have been great.
• At one point in the film, Eiza Gonzalez wears this denim outfit that appears to be a tight-fitting romper, but is revealed to be a set of separates ; a tiny, midriff-bearing jacket and high-waisted pants. Is this outfit historically accurate? I’m not being an asshole; I really want to know. Because it’s really cool.
• When does it come out on DVD?
• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Olivia Rutigliano

Previous article, next article, get the crime reads brief, get our “here’s to crime” tote.

Popular Posts

CrimeReads on Twitter

Love to Hate Her: Novels About Destructive Women

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

• RSS - Posts

Support CrimeReads - Become a Member

CrimeReads needs your help. The mystery world is vast, and we need your support to cover it the way it deserves. With your contribution, you'll gain access to exclusive newsletters, editors' recommendations, early book giveaways, and our new "Well, Here's to Crime" tote bag.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Hannah Waddingham Tells Photographer ‘Don’t Be a D—’ After Red Carpet Comment: ‘You Would Never Say That to a Man’

By Ellise Shafer

Ellise Shafer

• Romy Mars, Daughter of Sofia Coppola and Phoenix Frontman, Launches Music Career With Two Singles 1 day ago
• Gary Oldman Clarifies ‘Harry Potter’ Comments Where He Called His Acting ‘Mediocre’: I’m ‘Always Hypercritical’ and if I Was ‘Satisfied,’ That ‘Would Be the Death of Me’ 2 days ago
• Sean Baker Makes Movies About Sex Workers in Hopes of ‘Helping Remove the Stigma’ — and He’s ‘Already Talking About the Next One’ 2 days ago

Hannah Waddingham had some choice words for a photographer in response to a comment made about her on the red carpet at Sunday night’s Olivier Awards .

As captured on video posted by X user @odeiotedlasso, Waddingham was posing for photos on the red carpet when she stopped to address a photographer. Though what the photographer said is unclear, Waddingham responded: “Oh my god, you’d never say that to a man, my friend. Don’t be a dick, otherwise I’ll move off. Don’t say, ‘Show me leg.’ No.”

long story short: hannah was being her gorgeous self and the 📸 made some comment about her leg we couldn't quite make out and… well, the video speaks for itself. This woman is a role model. Always, always call pricks out on their bullshit. https://t.co/TUPwdqEYo2 pic.twitter.com/ybhxCo5FJ6 — bruna but with a posh accent (@odeiotedlasso) April 14, 2024

Popular on Variety

Waddingham was on hand to host the Olivier Awards, which celebrate the best in U.K. theater, and opened the show with a performance of “Anything Goes.” The big winner of the night was “Sunset Boulevard,” which won seven awards, including best actor in a musical for Tom Francis and actress in a musical for Nicole Scherzinger. The show’s other wins were the Sir Peter Hall Award for director Jamie Lloyd, best musical revival, lighting design, outstanding musical contribution and sound design.

Sarah Snook won best actress in a play for her one-woman adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and Mark Gatiss took home the best actor award for “The Motive and the Cue.” “Operation Mincemeat” was awarded best new musical.

More From Our Brands

Watch dua lipa, chris martin reflect on london’s music scene in ‘camden’ trailer, woodford reserve’s new bourbon is a delicious accident, ncaa, power five ok $2.7 billion antitrust settlement, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, evil premiere recap: duck, ben and other advice not heeded — plus, grade it, verify it's you, please log in.