Film Review: The Gentlemen

The Gentlemen is to Guy Ritchie what Chef was to Jon Favreau. Two filmmakers taking a break from the blockbuster game, and tackling a project that speaks more to their scrappy, low budget roots in order to prove the world – and to a degree, themselves, that they still have what it takes. In Chef, a post-Iron Man 2 Jon Favreau plays an acclaimed chef working for a big, fancy restaurant, who isn’t being allowed to be as creative as he wants to be, and when his attempt to do a classic dish again instead of something more inventive gets a scathing review, he quits and ends up restoring a food truck where he would have complete control over the kind of food served. Gee, I wonder what inspired Favreau.

In the case of The Gentlemen, Matthew McConaughey plays Mickey Pearson, an American cannabis tycoon based in the UK who built his empire from the ground up. He wants to leave the game, but when forces outside his control begin using crooked means to try and take control from under his nose, he is forced to go back to his old, violent ways to show that he is the king. If the metaphor didn’t seem obvious enough, there is a framing device involving Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a sleazy paparazzo, meets up with Mickey’s right hand man, Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), and essentially tries to blackmail the whole gang by telling them everything he knows about what they’ve been up to. And the way he tells them all the information is through a Hollywood style pitch meeting, complete with a literal screenplay written by Fletcher, containing all the info.

On top of all that, the two forces that Mickey is dealing with is an eccentric Jewish American billionaire, Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong), who he intends to sell his empire to, and the other is Dry Eye (Henry Golding), a hungry, young gangster who tries and fails to buy out Mickey. These two may or may not represent Hollywood and Chinese investors, respectively. After all, Chinese investors have been a huge part of the process of making and distributing Hollywood films this past decade to better serve Chinese audiences. My interpretation of the metaphor gets a bit messy from here, but if that was the intention, it does make the a-little-too-often Asian joke much more troubling than they already are.

This is about as classic a Guy Richie formula as you can get. Macho men, nice suits, dark humor, an eclectic soundtrack, colorful characters with various thick British dialects, bloody violence, and an intricate web of interweaving plot threads that is way more convoluted than it needs to be. After a decade of mostly underwhelming blockbusters (with the sole exception of the highly underappreciated Man From U.N.C.L.E.), Ritchie returns to the genre that he has made his mark in when he first burst into the scene, transcending any initial notions of being yet another Quentin Tarantino wannabee.

The results of this return? Well…I honestly can’t say it’s a total return to form, but at the same time, I cannot say it’s a tired retread. The biggest disappointment really is that after all this time, Ritchie doesn’t seem like he’s evolved as a filmmaker in anyway. The Gentlemen could easily fit in alongside some of his classics like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and RocknRolla. There hasn’t been much growth to his style or creative instincts, which means that some of the elements of those older classics that have not aged as gracefully are thoroughly present here, including the aforementioned Asian jokes, the dull attempts at being provocative, and the inclusion of an attempted rape scene that felt like a bit much, even for the this particular movie.

But when the film works, it really does work. The energy is still there, the sly banter is still there, and Ritchie still knows how to make the most out of his cast. Hugh Grant goes full character actor, chewing out the scenery with so much glee, and you know Ritchie had a lot of fun writing that character given his history in the tabloids. Charlie Hunnam is the best he’s ever been here, and after all these movies trying to turn him into a leading man, it turns out all he had to do was play the coolest guy on the planet, which Raymond very much is. He’s methodical, calm, and rocks the hell out of that beard. Golding is appropriately scummy, McConaughey as a marijuana baron is so obvious that works, and other folks like Eddie Marsan and Michelle Dockery make the most with the material they get. Aside from Hugh Grant, the big standout for me was Colin Farrell, who plays Coach, a local boxing coach trying to help underprivileged kids who gets unwittingly caught up in the web of violence.

In in a lot of these bright spots with the actors where you wish The Gentlemen was way better than it was. It’s by no means a bad film, but you can see where it could be better. It’s frustrating seeing a film where Guy Ritchie is basically saying “just cause I’m getting old, I’m still the best at what I do” but he doesn’t offer much artistic self-reflection beyond that. I suppose you could say the same for a lot of his classics, but Snatch was literally 20 whole years ago, and it’s odd that Ritchie hasn’t developed any new perspective on his usual bag of tricks. Sure, despite some flaws, the film is entertaining; it is by no means boring, and I guess there can be some charm in seeing an old dog do old tricks.