REVIEW: "The Gentlemen" is chivalrous but crass, and that's how they like it
Matthew McConaughey and Charlie Hunnam in The Gentlemen, directed by Guy Ritchie.
"There's fuckery afoot." There isn't another quote from Guy Ritchie's own hand that sums up a Guy Ritchie movie better than that. And here’s the thing about most of his films: you either like them or you don’t.
Every once in a while, though, he’ll make a film that both the critics and audiences love, but – sorry – The Gentlemen is clearly not it. Half the time I was amused by how Ritchie can keep the most convoluted plots with an extraneous number of screwball characters interesting, but the other half of the time I’m fiddling with the keys in my pocket pretending I have some sort of fast forward button.
Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is England’s biggest weed dealer. He is from Oxford University by way of poor America – Ritchie’s cheat code so we don’t get assaulted by a potentially ear-bleeding English accent from McConaughey – and seeks to exit the game and retire with his wife, Rosalind (Michelle Dockery), by selling his drug empire to super rich guy Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong) for $400 million. The potential deal is sniffed out by Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a PI hired by a British tabloid run by Big Dave (Eddie Marsan), but rather than turning in a story, Fletcher decides to get a piece of the pie and proposes a deal to Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), Mickey's right-hand man. The rest of the film winds and turns, and along the way we are confronted by a rival gang led by Dry Eye (Henry Golding) and a gang of idiotic but remarkably competent bunch of amateur boxers led by their well-meaning Coach (Colin Farrell).
If that was exhaustive to read, then wait until you sit through two more hours of this mind-numbing plot. The thing with Ritchie is that sometimes his films seem overstuffed, and it takes a ton of focus to keep track of what’s going on. Sometimes Ritchie needs a reminder that we need to calm down a little, and his way of doing that is to have Fletcher and Raymond talk the audience through basically two-thirds of the film until everyone is up to speed.
Colin Farrell as a boxing coach called, um, Coach.
But it’s still a massive information dump, and the lack of chemistry between Grant, who gets more annoying as the movie progresses, and Hunnam, who hasn't tried very hard to shed his Sons of Anarchy identity, means these scenes get increasingly tiring. Its only amusement comes from Grant's natural British smugness (or charm, if you're a fan), and a few lines that are sharp and funny, but more because of its word play than its delivery. The multi-use barbecue they gather around is arguably more interesting than either of them.
Ultimately, what saves this film are its character actors, with strong performances from Dockery, Marsan, Strong and the undeniably charming Farrell, who continues to steal every scene. McConaughey's steely stare makes him believable as the "lion" of the bush you don't want to mess with, and Hunnam's stoic presence makes him an ideal taskmaster, but neither of them really reach the depths of the acting they're capable of. As much as I disliked Golding's characters in his previous films (Crazy Rich Asians, A Simple Favor), he plays the sucker pretty well, and without spoiling any more is well-suited as the ambitious but short-sighted Dry Eye.
In true Ritchie fashion, there's always one character who seems to know more than everyone, and Ritchie always has this uncontrollable urge to pull of the mask and say: "A-ha! I've got you now, ya cunt!" It feels convenient, even if Ritchie tries to explain some of these things in his usual schizophrenic editing style, and it becomes tiring when the upper hand is never the upper hand because there's always another upper hand – Raymond is particularly guilty of this – and therefore makes all the other information the film presents up until the turning point inconsequential. The audience is forced to be spoon-fed the plot twist rather than being given a chance to intellectually engage with the material.
The inherent randomness of The Gentlemen, especially how Coach's crew ends up having such an impact on the film's plot, is a Ritchie special, and the ending, in which the film begins to get really self-referential, is a tired trope and handled with as much care as Coach's crew of motley fools. At best, it's a gimmicky draw for laughs, but at its worst there's a high level of arrogance in even implying that there will be some sort of sequel for this uneven adventure.
The Gentlemen gets two and a half stars out of four.
