The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie back in his manor. After the big-budget misfire of King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword and the big-budget success of Aladdin, Ritchie’s 11th feature returns to his roots: the London-based crime milieu of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and RocknRolla. If it lacks the fizz of his best efforts, it’s an entertaining mix of convoluted plotting, colourful criminals, a heightened feel (“Fuck off back from whence he came”) and pig-fucking gags.
In outline, the body of the story is simple enough. American ex-pat and Rhodes scholar Mickey Pearson (McConaughey) graduates from Oxford with a nifty sideline in selling weed to posho students, building a marijuana empire under the grounds of Britain’s filthy rich. Yet wishing to dedicate himself to the love of his life Ros (Dockery), he looks to offload his farms to Jewish investor Mathew (Strong). Word gets out that Mickey wants to sell, attracting the attention of debonair triad Dry Eye (Golding), a “Chinese James Bond”. Then all hell breaks loose.
There's lots of fun to be had.
Yet, in true Ritchie style, this is complicated by the fact that we are told the story through the eyes of scuzzy private investigator Fletcher (Grant), who is relaying the plot to Mickey’s No. 2 Ray (Hunnam) in order to blackmail Ray’s boss. Fletcher has fashioned the events into a movie script (named ‘Bush’) and his pitch sees him as an unreliable narrator — embellishing bits, rewinding bits, even changing the format to anamorphic — as he spins the yarn. We know we can’t trust him as he thinks Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is “a bit boring”.
There’s interesting thematic material buried in here (the class divide, the mellowing qualities of middle age, the relationship between the media and the underworld), but Ritchie mostly ignores this in the rush to tell his story. As such, sidelines — Ray’s rescue of the drug-addicted daughter of one of Mickey’s benefactors, for instance — feel superfluous to the main plot, while key components, such as Mickey and Ros’ relationship, feel underserved.
Still, there’s lots of fun to be had. Ritchie’s style may be more refined these days, but he has not matured enough to stop the carpet c-bombing, witty subtitles, animated maps, YouTube fight-porn parodies and Tarantino-esque digressions. McConaughey, Golding and Hunnam are all decent, but the best of the bunch are hanging around the edges: Grant’s bizarrely voiced sleaze-bucket PI (note his delight at Ray’s barbecue that warms your legs while it cooks the steaks), Colin Farrell having a ball in a check tracksuit as a boxing coach, and Dockery’s granite-hard gangster’s moll. “There’s fuckery afoot,” she says at one point about Mickey’s predicament. It’s a pretty good tagline for Ritchie’s slippery, enjoyable flick.
