Operation Mincemeat - workmanlike retelling of spectacular wartime deception

Operation Mincemeat, so the film tells us, was the most spectacular success in the whole history of deception.

Almost inevitably, the film itself is far from being the most spectacular success in the whole history of cinema.

It’s a workmanlike production which builds nicely in the first half, goes just a little off the boil in the second when the tension should be at its greatest before rallying for a rousing conclusion complete with a succession of typed credits telling us what happened next to all concerned.

Whether it has done full justice to a truly remarkable story, the answer, sadly, is probably not – for all it is a film which is enjoyable, largely absorbing and certainly well acted.

Operation Mincemeat was a 1943 Allied piece of derring-do, an audacious plan to hoodwink Hitler which worked precisely because it was so very, very audacious. Given events thus far in the war, it was obvious to everyone that the Allies’ next step would be to invade Sicily. Therefore it became crucial to persuade the Germans that – rather surprisingly – the invasion target was going to be Greece. And to that end a truly outrageous plan was hatched, namely to drop a dead body into the sea off Spain, with the corpse attached to a brief case containing a hugely “top secret” letter causally betraying that Greece was the true target (which, of course, it wasn’t).

The film is at its best in the first half as an unlikely foursome – Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu, Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley, Kelly Macdonald as Jean Leslie and Penelope Wilton as Hester Leggett – construct a plausible backstory for their corpse whom they name “Major William Martin”, in fact the body of a vagrant who died after ingesting rat poison, knowingly or accidentally. They invent Major Martin’s world from scratch including a girlfriend loosely based on Jean. And in doing so, Montagu and Jean are drawn ever closer while Cholmondeley looks on with treacherous jealousy. This is where the film really succeeds.