THE GENTLEMEN
Guy Ritchie (2019)
3 STARS
Perhaps Guy Ritchie should have left the ‘London gangster’ film alone, maybe he should have let it settle back in the early 2000s but here we are, facing another of Ritchie’s signature genre and … it isn’t a bad installment. As we have come to expect, it all goes Pete-tong (wrong) as a successful drug distributor attempts to leave the business like a gentleman. Blackmail, murder, back-stabbing and hilarity, ensue as the situation escalates.
The year 1998 gave us our first glimpse of Ritchie’s gangsters of London with the successful Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, the era ended with the less than impressive RocknRolla in 2008, the highlight being 2000’s Snatch. The Gentlemen lands somewhere in the middle. The opening act is hard to sit through, 45 minutes being bombarded by metaphor after metaphor, plot literally being explained, and masturbatory nods to his past films will leave you wishing Ritchie had stuck with his ventures in to other genres. Then comes a catalyst, a game-changer, by the name of Colin Farrell, and the film is flipped on its head. Characters that were grating and dated now seem fresh and relatable, dialogue that was once monotonous and round-about is quick hitting and quite frankly, funny.
The casting misses the mark occasionally, but on the whole is satisfactory. Jeremy Strong is not believable as the big-shot American money-man. Mathew McConaughey is passable as the titular ‘Gentleman’, although his role is mostly utilised for plot-progression. It is elsewhere that we find our truly intriguing characters. Michelle Dockery is impeccable as McConaughey’s partner in crime and perfectly delivers, undoubtedly, the best line in the film. Charlie Hunnam is excellent as McConaughey’s right hand man, although his accent is hard to place at times. Colin Farrell is the standout hero of the cast with the excellent display of a youth centre boxing coach with a debt to pay but nothing more.
The Ritchie-esque quick cuts and title cards are, as to be expected, abundant but pass by with little obtrusion to the film. The build-up to the finale is well executed and all of the interesting characters are involved as we wind our way to the finale. It is Farrell’s Gen-Y cronies that really differentiate this film from the likes of Snatch and Lock, Stock. These are characters that we have not seen before in this fashion and jaws will be dropped as their antics, as the social media obsessed youngsters, refresh the genre. It is a shame however, that we are presented with the sigh-inducing Americanism that the bad guys are always Russian.
A fun new film in Ritchies’ London gangster repertoire, The Gentleman has its laugh out loud moments and suspenseful scenes that entertain to the end. It is not the best film in this style, nor is it the worst. Enjoy it for what it is and appreciate the heavy-handed mix of comedy and action in a film that will forever be compared to its predecessors.