Film review: Operation Mincemeat

published 21 April 2022

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If you’re after a “fun night out” and enjoyed Romancing the Stone (1984), this film might be just the ticket, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Sandra Bullock plays Loretta Sage, an archaeologist turned romance novelist who is abducted by a villainous English media tycoon (Daniel Radcliffe), and taken to a “forgotten” Atlantic island to look for a priceless artefact that he believes is buried there. Before long though, the “dishy-but-dim model” (Channing Tatum) who features on Sage’s book jackets arrives on the scene, determined to “make life replicate art” by saving her life. Bullock and Tatum have “an easy, winning chemistry”, and Brad Pitt, playing an “alpha-male tracker”, steals the few scenes he is in, but they are all, alas, let down by Radcliffe, who’s been “thunderously miscast” as the baddie and exudes about as much menace as a “ham-and-cheese sandwich”.

Not so long ago, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, a “splashy comedy in which two brand-name stars were amusingly marooned on a tropical isle” would have been a sure-fire hit. These days, this kind of silly, escapist fluff “almost looks quaint”. Yet the film could be described as “knowingly dated”, as it seems designed to make you wish they still made movies as “big, broad” and “cheesy” as this.

I wasn’t hugely charmed, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. The film is fun, but only “about 50%” as fun as it thinks it is, and there are also “outbreaks of extreme violence” that feel “puzzlingly incongruous”. For all that, it’s a “pleasure” to watch something so “unpretentiously light-hearted”, and I can think of “worse ways of easing away” an evening.