OPERATION MINCEMEAT

I guess we can forgive this 2021 film it's rather laughable title, since it is indeed about a World War 2 intelligence operation with this name.  And a very important operation it was since it successfully fooled the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily, thereby saving many lives.

The basic deception was to place false papers on a corpse of a made-up British soldier, revealing the planned invasion of Greece, and then arranging for the corpse to be washed up in Spain where German agents would get involved.

This story had already been told once before in a 1956 film, 'The Man Who Never Was'.

You would think the story of the operation would be sufficiently gripping in itself, but the makers of both films didn't think so because in both cases they are guilty of making embellishments.

The 1956 film adds various incidents which are probably fictional to the goings on in Spain.

The 2019 film is more focussed on the two men in London whose baby this operation is: Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, played by Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen respectively.  Since they both come across as traditional stiff upper lip Brits of this era the makers of the film decided to liven things up by creating a love story of sorts between Montagu and a female member of the team, Jean Leslie, well played by Kelly Macdonald.

I'm glad they did so because otherwise I might have found this film really quite dull in its worthiness, although then again I'm not really its target audience since I have a limited appetite for this sort of thing which as here is often stultifying in its predictability (it's why I have thus far avoided films such as 'The King's Speech' and 'Darkest Hour') .

Anyway it certainly does what it says on the can.