‘The Gentlemen' Plays Like Guy Ritchie's Greatest Hits [Review]

Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen” attempts to batter viewers into submission with his new British gangster flick, which despite its good moments leaves you feeling you’ve been told exactly how to feel throughout its run time.

The film opens like one of Matthew McConaughey’s Wild Turkey Whisky adverts as he sits, smoldering into the distance before uttering the movie’s first words to himself in his all too captivating tone. What follows is a mishmash of a first act in which the only real highlight is Hugh Grant’s cockney caricature ‘Fletcher’ Monologuing away to the severely fed-up Raymond (Charlie Hunnam). Following McConaughey’s Mickey Pearson and his attempts to sell-up his British Weed empire, the story hits both glorious and bum notes along the way. 

“The Gentlemen” doesn’t really hit its stride until the midway point, a moment in which Hunnam himself is given an expletive-laden monologue of his own to spout, a scene littered with colorful language, violence, and above all else the humor Richie has been trying to conjure up all along, a moment rich in the nostalgia of both “Snatch” and “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”. 

The film and its characters are at their best when they revel in their own absurdity, and with an air of self-awareness, and these moments mainly come when Hunnam and Grant are sharing a scene, whilst the introduction of Colin Farell’s Coach will jointly make you laugh out loud and want to revisit his magical turn in “In Bruges.”

However, its bum notes do come in the form of both Jeremy Strong and Henry Golding jarringly laughable performances, especially Golding’s ‘Dry Eye’ who evokes the same amount of fear as Vince Vaughn in his gangster overlord role in True Detective’s disappointing second season. 

And whilst Ritchie launches his playbook at the screen with hits and misses a-plenty, it becomes hard to shake the notion that this film wants to be the gangster answer to the ‘Kingsman’ franchise. Like it’s begging you (literally at one point) for a sequel. An idea which has some small merit, given seemingly overwhelmingly positive audience reactions and the love for the film’s best characters mentioned above, I myself could have spent another 20 minutes in the company of Grant’s slippery ‘Fletcher’ and Hunnam’s brilliantly dry ‘Raymond’. 

Enjoyable. Funny and sharp at times but littered with eye-rolling moments that make you feel Richie is stuck in his own past. [C+]