Reviewed: Operation Mincemeat

"We're going to play a humiliating trick on Hitler!"

This is the second film about Operation Mincemeat, a World War II deception where the British gave fake documents to a corpse to successfully convince the Nazis that they were planning to attack Greece rather than Sicily. The first was The Man Who Never Was, an excellent film based on the book of the same name by the operation's commander Ewen Montagu. That original film is probably a better film but much of the operation was still secret at the time so this new version gives a more accurate telling of it. 

Here Colin Firth plays Ewen Montagu and the character is pitched as being in a sort of double act with his second of command Charles Cholmondeley played by Matthew Macfadyen. Both characters are pretty bland unfortunately thanks to a script which doesn't really flesh them out and it's just another one in a growing series of Colin Firth roles which are flawed but ultimately likeable quiet quiet British blokes. Kelly McDonald gives the best performance here but it felt like they didn't quite know how to end her character's story and she suddenly just leaves and that's it. 

The film has a stellar supporting cast packed full of actors that any Brit will recognise from numerous TV and film roles including the Jason Issacs, Simon Russell Beale, the late Paul Ritter, Mark Gatiss, Will Keen, Hattie Morahan, Mark Bonnar and James Fleet. It helps a film when members of the supporting cast are such superb actors and even the likes of fairly thankless characters like a driver becomes far more interesting thanks to good casting. 

There were a couple of minor tweaks to the story from reality, like Churchchill giving the final go ahead for the operation when in real life he let Eisenhower make the final decision, but on the whole this seemed to be accurate with it's history. The part of the story I didn't know before was what came after the body being released as the Brits used their extensive intelligence network to ensure the document was passed on to the Nazis and to intercept communications, all this being unknown at the release of the previous film. 

There's quite a few tonal shifts which feel pretty jarring in the film. At times it's pretty much a comedy as the characters concoct and implement this ludacris plan. But then suddenly they decide to really focus in the grimness of using a corpse or the huge danger of the Nazis and it feels like a different film. The film could have worked as a comedy but it's largely presented as a drama and doesn't need the numbers of jokes it contains. 

I think the main thing that makes this film work is the true story it is based on, so absurd yet so brilliant at the same time and one of the best stories that came out of the Second World War. There's not a lot else that really excels in this film but it's hard to go too far wrong when you have such an incredible story to tell. 

A perfectly watchable film with an incredible true story that could have had a script which was less jarring tonally and fleshed out the characters more.