The Gentlemen (2020)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Guy Ritchie’s return to his breakneck, cartoonish style of violent action comedies will be just what his fans have been wanting for a long period of time.
A stellar cast having a ball on screen makes The Gentlemen easy and entertaining to watch and experience.
Hugh Grant steals the show as Fletcher, a conniving narrator whose presence, accent, and demeanor is yet another wonderful on screen creation.
NO
Ritchie still loves working cheap and lazy with some of his humor - gay panic and racially-targeted jokes do not escape his screenplay.
Though simple enough framework to understand, Ritchie’s screenplay could have taken one or two more turns through the editing bay, as the details of The Gentlemen are dense and unnecessarily convoluted.
Matches a smug sensibility that may put people off, which, to be fair, is not all that different for other Guy Ritchie films. Just may not be your particular bag, if you have not liked his work previously.
OUR REVIEW
After delivering box office hits Sherlock Holmes and Disney’s live-action remake of Aladdin, Guy Ritchie has pivoted back to where it all began for him with his throwback action/comedy The Gentlemen. Calling to mind films which put the now 51-year-old filmmaker on the map; namely, Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, his gritty, sleazy style of British crime/comedy has now returned - for better or worse.
The Gentlemen features a robust cast, amped and ready to play.
Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is an American-born English transplant, who studied for a time at Oxford and turned his savvy business sense into that of a cannabis empire. His exorbitant wealth has been borne through side-deals, hustles, and winking handshake agreements with the wealthiest of the wealthy among British elite.
As Mickey looks to sell his business and retire with wife Rosalind (Michelle Dockery), he draws interest from a strange, peculiar businessman Berger (Jeremy Strong), interested in acquiring all of Mickey’s assets. Soon, however, Berger’s purchase is challenged by a heavy known as Dry Eye (Henry Golding). Dry Eye wants the business, as he already oversees a massive heroin distribution ring, and is willing to do whatever it takes to seize control of Mickey’s operations.
Thugs and gangsters get involved. We got Russians here too. A wide, international array of characters, who get murdered, manipulated, or engage in similar behaviors, dictate the pace of The Gentlemen for nearly two full hours.
The story, easy in premise, convoluted in the details, is told in an almost play-within-a-play format by a wacky, nefarious private investigator/wannabe screenwriter named Fletcher (Hugh Grant). He has been something of a fly-on-the-wall for much of what has transpired and finds a captive audience in the nattily dressed and mild-mannered Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), a colleague of Mickey’s. Thinking he has Raymond dead-to-rights on the secrets he has uncovered and written about in a scratch screenplay he wants to sell, Fletcher promises to make it all go away - for the small price of £20 million.
Grant steals the show, unable to hide his unbridled delight in playing the morally deficient, provocative instigator who relishes the chance to spill all the tea and cash in on a huge payday. Grant’s presence with an impish smile and storyteller’s zeal, finds the actor bringing to life yet one more fascinating character creation. Similar to the work he has delivered recently in diverse roles found in Paddington 2, A Very English Scandal, and Florence Foster Jenkins, he captures the complexity, depth, and personality in a character other actors would play safe, gloss over and ignore.
As great as Grant is here, other performances are hit or miss. McConaughey can play this kind of role in his sleep, and proves mostly unremarkable, while the excitement of seeing Dockery outside of Downton Abbey is muted when Ritchie has next to nothing for her to do. Hunnam is terrific as a stoic, calm henchman of sorts, but Strong never finds a common throughline for a character who is mocked for being Jewish, has effete characteristics for no real reason, and never rises above caricature.
The Gentlemen is an up and down affair. And Ritchie still carries a fair amount of enthusiastic juvenilia in his screenwriting. I would hope that mocking Asian people for their names and heritage and having gay people make straight people nervous would not have a place in a 2020 screenplay, but I guess Ritchie adheres to the “we are all too politically correct nowadays” ideology and just decided to go with jokes that felt queasy, even dating back more than 20 years ago.
That those tired and lazy jokes are housed within a movie that moves quickly and has more than enough scenes to make us laugh and entertain us is a damper of sorts. To Ritchie’s credit, he feels alive and rambunctious again, and much of The Gentlemen is a breeze to sit through.
Ritchie’s script may get trapped in the weeds and he may love to hear his characters talk too much, but for those who longed for the director to leave mainstream Hollywood blockbusters behind and return to his roots, The Gentlemen is going to feel both old and new all at the same time.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, Hugh Grant, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Marsan, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell, Samuel West, Jason Wong, Brittany Ashworth, Chidi Ajufo, Tom Wu.
Director: Guy Ritchie
Written by: Guy Ritchie (screenplay); Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies (story)
Release Date: January 24, 2020
STX Films