In Review: 'Abigail,' 'The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare'

It's tricky: A ballerina with a secret surprises some kidnappers and some British spies get the better of a bunch of Nazis in this week's new releases.

Abigail
Dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
109 min.

The best way to watch Abigail is to know as little about it as possible and take its early scenes at face value. Ignore the marketing, don’t watch the trailer, avoid the Wikipedia page, and do your best to try not to learn the film’s original title. (And, while you’re at it, you might want to save reviews for later, too.) The latest film from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—members of the Radio Silence filmmaking collective—opens as a throwback to post-Reservoir Dogs heist films in which a group of colorful criminals trade wisecracks and pop culture references as a sure-thing job starts to unravel and no one’s sure who to trust anymore. Then it takes a turn.

Abigail’s band of outsiders even have colorful code names, theirs taken from members of the Rat Pack rather than colors. Their boss simply goes by Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito). He’s assembled a team of specialists who don’t know each other, all the better to pull off the risky job of kidnapping Abigail (Alisha Weir), the ballerina daughter of a powerful man whose name they also don’t know. They pull it off with relative ease then retreat to the creepy mansion that will serve as their hideout where they’re told by Lambert that they simply have to stay the night to earn a fortune in ransom money. (Shades of House on Haunted Hill.) And they might have easily gotten away with it if Abigail didn’t take its gearshift cues from another early Quentin Tarantino script, namely [redacted]. Before long it becomes apparent their seemingly meek captive is actually a [redacted] and has no intention of letting her captors get away with their crime (and seems giddy at the prospect of making sure they don’t).

Filled with colorful characters played by Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, and others, including the late Angus Cloud (to whom the film has been dedicated), Abigail is both a pretty good quippy kidnapping thriller and a pretty good horror movie. But it’s not great as either. Only Barrera’s Joey develops more than a single dimension—though Stevens has a lot of fun with a Queens accent—and once the over-the-top Grand Guignol climax kicks in it, all becomes a bit exhausting. It’s fun for a good while, and it’s nice to see Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin stepping away from the diminishing returns of their Scream films and rediscovering some of the energy of Ready or Not. (Abigail’s script comes from the Ready or Not duo of Guy Busick, who also worked on Radio Silence’s Scream films, and R. Christopher Murphy.)But though, like its central character, Abigail’s not what it first appears to be, it ends up looking pretty familiar anyway. —Keith Phipps

Abigail sinks its teeth into theaters tonight.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Dir. Guy Ritchie
120 min.

The end credits for The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare begin like many austere historical fictions about heroic wartime derring-do, with a thumbnail picture of each major character and a postscript about their exploits. They’re the biggest laugh in a film that, in principle anyway, strives to be as generously entertaining as possible. This is Guy Ritchie’s drunk history, a cartoonish tale of five British meatheads cutting down hundreds of crooked-shooting Nazis that self-evidently has no relation to anything that actually happened. It’s like some weird Human Centipede situation where Ritchie feasts shamelessly on the alternate history of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and out comes some unholy pastiche of real history and every other tough-guy genre picture Ritchie has metabolized. Call this The Dirty Quintet or The Beefcakes of Navarone. 

On the other hand, when you’re making a film about a secret group of special-ops warriors, who’s to say what’s real and what’s myth? (Let me answer my own rhetorical question: It’s myth.) With the Nazis plowing through Europe in 1940 and his advisors suggesting appeasement with Hitler, Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) forms the Special Operations Executive, a rogue team of espionage and sabotage operatives who bypass government oversight and military protocol. Leading this group of ne’er-do-wells is Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill), who surrounds himself with four elite fighters and serial rule-breakers (Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding, Alex Pettyfer, and Hero Fiennes Tiffin) to embark on various missions impossible. 

Here, Churchill and SOE’s leadership—including Ian Fleming, who introduces himself cheekily as “Fleming. Ian Fleming”—send the men on Operation Postmaster, a wildly difficult scheme to infiltrate a West African port that supplies the Nazis’ U-boat fleet in the Atlantic. As Gus and the boys take to the seas, masquerading as Swedish fishermen, they get help on the ground from Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun), a highly connected businessman on the port, and Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González), a glamorous Jewish woman sent to distract a key Nazi officer (Til Schweiger, on loan from Inglourious Basterds.) If everything goes according to plan, our seven heroes will be up against 200 Nazis. 

Ritchie likes those odds a little too much. One of the irksome problems with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is that there’s never any worry that a bullet will so much as graze any of Gus’ core guys. It’s like an wartime action adventure where all five men are Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, so confident in their security amid a hail of gunfire that they barely bother to duck. Meanwhile, the Nazis do not look capable of conquering a ham sandwich, let alone much of Europe, so these faceless hordes can cut down in vast numbers. There’s some satisfaction in that, of course, and Ritchie tells his tall tale cleanly, aided by a charismatic rogues gallery that wisecracks their way through one bloody melee after another. But the film seems destined for sleepy afternoons on cable. — Scott Tobias

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare arrives in theaters tonight.