Movie Review: 'Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' amps up a true-tale WWII heist

The latest Guy Ritchie flick “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” has a spine of true story to it, even if it does all it can to amplify a long-declassified WWII tale with enough dead Nazis to make “Inglourious Basterds” blush

The latest Guy Ritchie flick “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” has a spine of true story to it, even if it does all it can to amplify a long-declassified World War II tale with enough dead Nazis to make “Inglourious Basterds” blush.

The result is a jauntily entertaining film but also an awkward fusion. Ritchie’s film, which opens in theaters Friday, takes the increasingly prolific director’s fondness for swaggering, exploitation-style ultraviolence and applies it to a real-life stealth mission that would have been thrilling enough if it had been told with a little historical accuracy.

In 2016, documents were declassified that detailed Operation Postmaster, during which a small group of British special operatives sailed to the West African island of Fernando Po, then a Spanish colony, in the Gulf of Guinea. Spain was then neutral in the war, which made the Churchill-approved gambit audacious. In January 1942, they snuck into the port and sailed off with several ships — including the Italian merchant vessel Duchessa d’Aosta — that were potentially being used in Atlantic warfare.

Sounds like a pretty good movie, right? The story even features James Bond author Ian Fleming, giving it more than enough grist for a WWII whopper. “Operation Postmaster” makes for a better title, too, than the ungainly “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." Ritchie, however, already has an operation — last year's “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” — in his filmography.

Ritchie, who turned Sherlock Holmes into a bulked-up action star, has always preferred to beef up his movies. It’s a less-noted side effect of the superhero era that regular ol’ heroes have been supersized, too, as if human-sized endeavors aren't quite enough anymore. And “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” in which a handful of operatives kill approximately a thousand Nazis, has a fine, brawny duo in Henry Cavill and Alan Ritchson.

In the movie’s opening scene, they're relaxing on a small ship in the Atlantic when Germans rush aboard. After a few laughs and a Nazi monologue that plays like a poor man’s version of Christoph Waltz’s masterful oration in “Inglourious Basterds,” the duo makes quick mincemeat of them, leaving blood splattered across the henley shirt of Anders Lassen (Ritchson, a charming standout).

Not much has changed in Ritchie-land, though he’s swapped tweed for skintight tees and cable-knit sweaters in a rollicking high-seas adventure. As in the director's previous movies, everyone — and, as before, nearly all male — seems to be having a good time. Likewise, Ritchie revels in his characters' debonair nonchalance while meting out all manner of savagery.

The assembled group of operatives are said to be delinquents and misfits, though they steadfastly adhere to the polite manners of past Ritchie protagonists. They may kill with bloodthirsty impunity but what really matters is upholding an old-school sense of style. When the undercover agents Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González, who silkily cuts like a knife through the film) and Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, excellent) ride a Nazi-controlled train on their way to Fernando Po, they look in disgust at the German sausages they're served. Later, someone will say, “I hate Nazis not because they’re Nazis but because they’re so gauche.”

And in proficiently staged set pieces, Ritchie makes his own case for a bit of class. As a journeyman filmmaker now pumping out a movie a year, he's in many ways grown to be a more complete director. He's adept at giving the many members of his large ensemble moments to shine — including Henry Golding, Alex Pettyfer, Cary Elwes, Freddie Fox as Fleming, Til Schweiger as a barbaric Nazi and Rory Kinnear as Churchill.

And once the film — based on the nonfiction book by Damien Lewis — settles into a seedy, sunny West African setting and the nighttime heist finale, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” proves a spirited, if grossly exaggerated diversion.

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” a Lionsgate release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence throughout and some language. Running time: 92 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

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‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.

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‘Civil War’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director alex garland narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Alex Garland and I’m the writer director of ‘Civil War’. So this particular clip is roughly around the halfway point of the movie and it’s these four journalists and they’re trying to get, in a very circuitous route, from New York to DC, and encountering various obstacles on the way. And this is one of those obstacles. What they find themselves stuck in is a battle between two snipers. And they are close to one of the snipers and the other sniper is somewhere unseen, but presumably in a large house that sits over a field and a hill. It’s a surrealist exchange and it’s surrounded by some very surrealist imagery, which is they’re, in broad daylight in broad sunshine, there’s no indication that we’re anywhere near winter in the filming. In fact, you can kind of tell it’s summer. But they’re surrounded by Christmas decorations. And in some ways, the Christmas decorations speak of a country, which is in disrepair, however silly it sounds. If you haven’t put away your Christmas decorations, clearly something isn’t going right.” “What’s going on?” “Someone in that house, they’re stuck. We’re stuck.” “And there’s a bit of imagery. It felt like it hit the right note. But the interesting thing about that imagery was that it was not production designed. We didn’t create it. We actually literally found it. We were driving along and we saw all of these Christmas decorations, basically exactly as they are in the film. They were about 100 yards away, just piled up by the side of the road. And it turned out, it was a guy who’d put on a winter wonderland festival. People had not dug his winter wonderland festival, and he’d gone bankrupt. And he had decided just to leave everything just strewn around on a farmer’s field, who was then absolutely furious. So in a way, there’s a loose parallel, which is the same implication that exists within the film exists within real life.” “You don’t understand a word I say. Yo. What’s over there in that house?” “Someone shooting.” “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”

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By Manohla Dargis

A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.

It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.

In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film . That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“ 28 Days Later ”), and then as a writer-director (“ Ex Machina ”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.

By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.

The Culture Desk Poster

‘Civil War’ Is Designed to Disturb You

A woman with a bulletproof vest that says “Press” stands in a smoky city street.

One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.

The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to Washington. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.

As the miles and hours pass, Garland adds diversions and hurdles, including a pair of playful colleagues, Tony and Bohai (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai), and some spooky dudes guarding a gas station. Garland shrewdly exploits the tense emptiness of the land, turning strangers into potential threats and pretty country roads into ominously ambiguous byways. Smartly, he also recurrently focuses on Lee’s face, a heartbreakingly hard mask that Dunst lets slip brilliantly. As the journey continues, Garland further sketches in the bigger picture — the dollar is near-worthless, the F.B.I. is gone — but for the most part, he focuses on his travelers and the engulfing violence, the smoke and the tracer fire that they often don’t notice until they do.

Despite some much-needed lulls (for you, for the narrative rhythm), “Civil War” is unremittingly brutal or at least it feels that way. Many contemporary thrillers are far more overtly gruesome than this one, partly because violence is one way unimaginative directors can put a distinctive spin on otherwise interchangeable material: Cue the artful fountains of arterial spray. Part of what makes the carnage here feel incessant and palpably realistic is that Garland, whose visual approach is generally unfussy, doesn’t embellish the violence, turning it into an ornament of his virtuosity. Instead, the violence is direct, at times shockingly casual and unsettling, so much so that its unpleasantness almost comes as a surprise.

If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “ MAGA civil war ,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.

Movies have played a role in that relitigation for more than a century, at times grotesquely. Two of the most famous films in history — D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” (which became a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool) and the romantic 1939 melodrama “Gone With the Wind” — are monuments to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Both were critical and popular hits. In the decades since, filmmakers have returned to the Civil War era to tell other stories in films like “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” that in addressing the American past inevitably engage with its present.

There are no lofty or reassuring speeches in “Civil War,” and the movie doesn’t speak to the better angels of our nature the way so many films try to. Hollywood’s longstanding, deeply American imperative for happy endings maintains an iron grip on movies, even in ostensibly independent productions. There’s no such possibility for that in “Civil War.” The very premise of Garland’s movie means that — no matter what happens when or if Lee and the rest reach Washington — a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Civil War Rated R for war violence and mass death. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this review misidentified an organization in the Civil War in the movie. It is the Western Forces, not the Western Front.

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Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘Big Sky’ Is a Big Disappointment From One of TV’s Best Creators

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

Since he quit his job as a lawyer to work full-time in television, David E. Kelley has had the kind of career of which dreams are made. He has been a chief creative force behind era-defining hits like L.A. Law , The Practice , and Ally McBeal . He has enough awards to fill a very large trophy case, and has written material that has helped more than 30 actors on his shows win Emmys. He has minted stars like Calista Flockhart (who wound up on the cover of Time , albeit not in the most flattering way) and been the writer of choice for pre-existing stars like Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. (He’s also been married to one, Michelle Pfeiffer, since 1993.) Though his specialty is quirky legal dramas like Boston Legal , he has written across genres on the small screen and the big one, including horror ( Lake Placid ) and even sports comedy ( Mystery, Alaska ).

Kelley is at a stage in his life and work where he can more or less do what he wants. Often, his choice of project makes perfect sense, even if his choices within those projects do not. It’s not hard, for example, to understand why he would want to re-team with Kidman and HBO for The Undoing , though the miniseries feels like a relic from The Practice days. In other situations, trying to figure out his reasons for taking on a particular show can be more interesting than the show itself. Case in point: his new ABC thriller Big Sky .

Kelley is among the most acclaimed, powerful, and influential showrunners in broadcast TV history, but his shows have appeared exclusively on cable, satellite, and streaming networks ever since CBS canceled his Robin Williams comedy The Crazy Ones back in 2014. At the end of a 2016 press conference to promote his Amazon law series Goliath , a reporter asked if Kelley ever imagined himself returning to one of the traditional networks where he first made it big. “Don’t think so” was his blunt answer. When you have A-list talent wanting to work with you in places that offer fewer creative restrictions, it’s hard to go back. But in recent years, Kelley has softened that stance. He developed a Lincoln Lawyer series that CBS ultimately didn’t pick up, and tonight he returns to the home of Boston Legal with Big Sky , starring Kylie Bunbury, Katheryn Winnick, and Ryan Phillippe as private investigators looking into a string of abductions in and around Helena, Montana.

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We open with Winnick’s Jenny upset to learn that best friend Cass (Bunbury) has slept with Jenny’s estranged husband Cody (Phillippe), with whom Cass runs a detective agency. The women argue and later get into a violent bar brawl, but the tension between them has to be put aside when two teenage sisters (Natalie Alyn Lind’s Danielle and Jade Pettyjohn’s Grace) who are friends of Jenny’s son go missing on the road into town. Soon, our heroes are tangled up in a human trafficking plot that involves a sociopathic long-haul trucker (Brian Geraghty’s Ronald) who lives with his mom (Valerie Mahaffey as Helen), a sketchy state trooper (John Carroll Lynch’s Rick), and a local sex worker (Jerrie, played by nonbinary actor Jesse James Keitel), plus lots and lots of shots of female kidnapping victims whimpering in fear over what’s going to happen to them.

Throughout the two episodes made available to critics, I kept wondering what Kelley saw in the C.J. Box books he’s adapting that made him want to do this show, and to return to ABC. There are echoes of other series he’s made — Helena is treated as a relatively small and remote community, like Rome from Picket Fences (*), and Mr. Mercedes had its own serial offender — but not in ways that play to his strengths. Cass and Jenny have issues with one another, and with Cody, but are for the most part well-adjusted, straightforward, good-guy types. Bunbury and Winnick continue to show the tremendous screen presence they’ve had on past series like Pitch and Vikings , respectively, but you can sense Kelley’s interest wandering away from them and towards Ronald, his mom, and Rick, as avatars of the kind of weirdness he loved to play around with during his previous stint as a broadcast creator. (Content restrictions have relaxed since then, too, so he can have Helen say things to Ronald like, “Go back to your room and masturbate while I make us some lunch.”)

(*) One puzzling decision: Like a number of network shows this fall, Kelley is sidestepping Covid-19; but he’s doing it by setting the show in a post-quarantine world, where nobody has to wear masks or socially distance, yet where characters occasionally refer to the impact the pandemic has had on life in America. Better to avoid the topic altogether than this half-hearted, distracting approach.  

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Maybe that’s the reason he’s come back to ABC? His more recent projects have had room for humor — Big Little Lies especially — but on the whole have felt more sober and sincere, and have tried to treat most of their central players as flesh-and-blood humans. Given the constant terror and victimization of multiple female characters here, Big Sky obviously isn’t a laugh riot; but several of its supporting characters are odd enough to seem as if they’re scratching an itch for the show’s creator. The problem is that the more Kelley scratches, the more the narrative tilts towards the most exploitative and unpleasant aspects of the story. Mr. Mercedes was about a serial killer and was adapting a series of Stephen King novels, and even that series wallowed much less in its victims’ suffering than this one does.

TV in general, and network TV in particular, is a more interesting place whenever David E. Kelley is making TV shows — even if those shows aren’t very good. But between Big Little Lies Season Two , The Undoing , and now Big Sky , he’s on an extended cold streak. His has been a great if fundamentally uneven career, mixing populist hits with more minor shows, such as Girls Club and The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire (where Lynch was one of the leads), that come and go with little fanfare. Big Sky unfortunately seems like one of the latter. Yet that first season of BLL , arriving in close proximity to Goliath and Mr. Mercedes , suggested there was still life in Kelley’s keyboard. Hopefully, his next projects find it again.

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Zac Hepburn says A Good Person's themes encompass addiction and grief. Beau Is Afraid is an epic three-hour horror comedy showcasing the work of Joaquin Phoenix.

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Chloe Guidry and Lily Gladstone in Under the Bridge

Under the Bridge review – Lily Gladstone leads respectful yet bland true crime drama

The recent Oscar nominee plays a cop investigating the brutal death of a teen in this noble but clunky retelling of a horrifying crime on Hulu

A s a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough , an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.

Though the crime itself is almost too awful to believe, there’s little to distinguish Under the Bridge, developed by the late Godfrey and Quinn Shephard, from other recent, better true-crime dramas such as Under the Banner of Heaven , The Staircase , The Act or The Girl from Plainville , nor from shows unraveling stomach-churning dead-girl crimes such as True Detective or Mare of Easttown. The series most overtly recalls the superlative Sharp Objects, HBO’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel, in that it also revolves around an unscrupulous, capital-T Troubled journalist returning to investigate the shocking murder of a teenage girl in her small home town, after escaping the tragic death of a sibling. But whereas Amy Adams’ cliched-to-hell unethical journalist was at least compelling, and the late Jean-Marc Vallée’s vision of midwestern Gothic hypnotic, Under the Bridge runs cold, even as it tries to capture the inexplicably white-hot rage of teenage girls (and one ill-placed, murderously angry teenage boy, played by Euphoria’s Javon Walton) on a small island in British Columbia in 1997.

The leaders of those girls are indeed terrifying – Josephine Brooks (Chloe Guidry) the alpha dog prone to bite swift and hard, Kelly Ellard (Izzy G) the chilling, lethal beta predator. The girls were self-styled “gangstas” who idolized John Gotti and fetishized mob violence; they practiced their cruelty on Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow), a Black fellow resident at Josephine’s group home, and particularly on Reena, a shy and yearning outcast desperate for friends, nursing a nascent obsession with the Notorious BIG. (The series gestures just enough at the late-90s moral panic over pop culture’s influence on teenagers.)

The first half of the series unspools both the “gang” allure to a young outcast like Reena and the months, days, hours and minutes before her death. Reena was isolated – the eldest daughter in a south Asian family, her mother Suman (Archie Panjabi) a devout Jehovah’s Witness, her father Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan) a Sikh immigrant from India, she was a minority within a minority on a very white island. Even in death, her life was dismissed – as a non-priority and “bic girl runaway” by the Saanich police (the moniker was “because we’re disposable”, says Dusty, in one of many heavy-handed lines). Only Godfrey, home from New York to write a book on Victoria’s disaffected youth, and officer Cam Bentland (Gladstone), a fellow outsider as an Indigenous woman adopted by the police chief (Matt Craven), take Reena’s disappearance seriously.

Gladstone, though occasionally prone to overacting, has always imbued her characters with a deep well of dignity, and does so again despite working with little characterization beyond “lonely and sad” as a Native woman adopted into a casually racist white family – a trait that highlights shameful Canadian national crimes, though is not enough for a whole person. Still, Gladstone is a reassuring on-screen presence, even if she’s forced to visibly wince at every mention of the word “race” or her boss/dad’s invocation of “sweetheart”. Keough, who rose above the middling Daisy Jones and the Six, is likewise underserved by the material; her portrayal of Rebecca as a hall-of-fame boundary-less, self-absorbed journalist – one who sleeps with a law enforcement source and does drugs with a teenage one – is at least watchable, if hardly palatable.

The thread of her “investigation”, if one could call it that, is hard to take, but at least there are others – most interestingly, if not smoothly, Reena’s dramatic rebellion against her parents in the months before her death. The fourth episode, written by Stuti Malhotra and directed by Nimisha Mujkerji, epitomizes the promise and pitfalls of this sprawl, juxtaposing the Virks’ family history as immigrants in British Columbia with a humiliating, hard-to-watch dinner they host for Reena’s soon-to-be attackers. The lines are on-the-nose and clunky, the episode too long, but the point stands: there was more to this story then, a different, better way to tell it now. If only its practice kept up with its principles.

Under the Bridge is available on Hulu in the US with a UK date to be announced

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Challengers

Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers (2024)

Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his f... Read all Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

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  • 36 Critic reviews
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  • April 26, 2024 (United States)
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