Guy Ritchie’s “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a jaunty burlesque of the conventions of the combat commando film.

Peopled with genuine characters, in every meaning of that phrase, and a piece of the real history that inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond, it’s a light, bloody-minded vamp of 007, and maybe the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Henry Cavill, at his dashing, flippant best, in a James Bond film.

The history is, well, close enough to get by. The militaria is just off enough for ordnance and tactics buffs to turn the anachronisms and far-fetched derring do into a drinking game.

Think of it has a more lighthearted “Dirty Dozen,” a “Navarone” tale with laughs, a “Kelly’s Heroes” with a character who likes to carve the hearts out of his Nazi prey.

Set in early (but never wintry) 1942, the last year the outcome of the war was really in doubt, it’s about a Churchill (Rory Kinnear) backed acknowledgement that “Hitler does not play by the rules, so neither are we.”

Over the objections of defeatists in his war cabinet (?), he pushes Brigadier Gubbins, aka the first “M” (Cary Elwes) to form a team to disrupt the Germans’ plans to resupply their U-Boats and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

There’s this Spanish possession off West Africa, Fernando Po, where a merchant ship, the Duchesa, and two tugboats are stocking up to head out to resupply wolf packs of submarines. “M” figures he has just the man for the job…in prison.

Captain Gus March-Philips (Cavill) is a bearded rogue and a charmer, who cadges cigars and good whisky and the privilege of hand-picking his team from M and M’s assistant, young Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox, of “Black 47,” son of famed British actor Edward Fox of “Day of the Jackal”).

He’ll need an arsonist-turned-underwater-demo expert (Henry Golding), an Irishman with sea experience (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and a hulking sadistic brute of a Swede (Alan Ritchson, who all but steals the picture).

That guy with inside knowledge of U-Boat ops and this resupply mission (Alex Pettyfer)? They’ll have to break him out of a German jail on the Canary Islands on their way, sailing a two-masted schooner south to the equatorial island.

March-Philips is so persuasive he has but to note “I’ve got to get a coat like that” for it to magically turn up in his possession. Friend or foe are helpless to his persuasion, whatever form it takes.

Eiza González of “Baby Driver” is a female spy of allure and nerve, and Babs Olusanmokun of the first “Dune” movie and TV’s “Star Trek” Strange New Worlds” is the African casino/club owner who works with her on the island to pave the way for the commandos.

Til Schweiger is the particularly sadistic German in charge of the resupply base.

“The only thing worse than a Nazi is him.”

This crew must shoot, with silenced Bren guns and bow and arrow, and punch and kick and stab-stab-stab their way through a lot of Nazis. Somebody’s going to sultrily croon “Mack the Knife” to entertain the “sausage and sauerkraut and black bread” eaters. And somebody’s on the lookout for a Gestapo overcoat in just his size.

The fights are furious, the explosions impressive and the action beats more adequate than overwhelming.

One of the striking things Ritchie went for with his historic ensemble piece is a diverse cast, a necessity in telling a story of Africa and Africans in a colony of Spaniards and Italians, all of them in the service of their German overlords.

“The Guns of Navarone” didn’t look like this, but real history did — not always, but a lot more often than the movies depicted it.

Golding is droll and jokey, Ritchson a burly goof, Fiennes plays the most serious Irishman ever depicted in a WWII movie and Pettyfer is something of a straight man — we meet him with his nipples attached to a car battery for torture purposes, the subject of much mirth.

But Cavill sets the tone with a bluff swagger and cigar-chomping confidence. Throw in González as a femme fatale to Fatherland followers of Der Fuhrer, slinky dresses and hitting the sexiest notes in the best-known song Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht ever wrote and you’ve got yourself a jokey Guy Ritchie movie that may not be the literal truth, just a goofier, more entertaining version.

The lapses in logic and anachronistic hardware, pistols that never miss and the like might make the historically-minded cringe.

But if you like your commando raids bloody and bloody fun (at times), “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” more or less fills the bill.

Rating: R, violence and profanity

Cast: Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Eiza González, Til Schweiger, Babs Olusanmokun, Rory Kinnear, Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Cary Elwes.

Credits: Directed by Guy Ritchie, scripted by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel and Guy Ritchie, based on the book by Damien Lewis. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:00