The Gentlemen: Guy Ritchie's return to the gangster genre is more bad than bad-ass
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-plus
You know a crime film is needlessly complex - innit? - when one of the culprits begins the film pitching the idea of a film based on the events and is still pitching it when the movie ends.
Really, you could elevator-pitch Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen in three words uttered by one of the characters, “There’s f---ery afoot!”
Marijuana czar McConaughey and right-hand man Charlie Hunnam take a meeting with the Chinese mob
This is arguably the plot of most of the glib British gangster movies that were the director’s early stock in trade. In fact, The Gentlemen could have been written by an AI that had uploaded Ritchie’s oeuvre and spit it out in a plot salad.
There’s a high-rolling American drug czar, an unscrupulous press baron, an even more unscrupulous London tabloid reporter, an arriviste Jewish millionaire with Lordly connections and a security detail of Mossad goons, Chinese mobsters (the word “Chinaman” gets used a lot), Russian mobsters, an ex-gangster trying to set street kids straight via boxing, posh trust-fund kids hooked on heroin, and a blackmail plan involving drugging a character into having sex with a pig.
Having written all that, I’m sure I’m missing something.
“A January film,” is industry shorthand for the stuff studios release during the dead of winter in hopes no one will notice. Ritchie did his part in this regard, with a slew of lazy double-crosses that don’t add up in the end.
However, he has both a knack for the occasional funny line, and for attracting casts who’ll give their all. And The Gentlemen boasts some game efforts, topped by Hugh Grant as Fletcher, a tab reporter with a mock-Cockey accent that is so at odds with the actor’s image that the first words out of his mouth get a laugh though they’re not meant to be funny.
Grant turns out to be pretty good at going low. After a quick, pre-flashback scene of a key character apparently being “whacked,” Fletcher shows up at the home of Ray (Charlie Hunnam), the right-hand man to American marijuana king Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), who sub-narrates McConaughey-esque passages about what it means to be King.
The whisky-drinking Fletcher is the one who delivers the script called Bush and pitches it to Ray, his way of saying he knows everything that’s going on and wants to be paid, large, for his silence.
Given the plethora of characters and moving parts, no one really emerges as a fully-formed character. So, the meat of every performance is how much you can do with screen time often measured in seconds.
The newspaper boss Big Dave (Eddie Marsan) is great in this regard. You could put him in a crowd and do a “Where’s Waldo?” game of “spot the sleazy British tab owner.”
Matthew, the rich guy with the goons, is played by Jeremy Strong, who has a similar, subtler shifty vibe that says, “I’m going to double-cross you eventually.”
And Colin Farrell has his moments as a pug boxing coach who doesn’t want any trouble, but will deliver it as a matter of duty.
Oddly, McConaughey, who has the most screen-time, is the least memorable character. He wants out of the marijuana business, and is looking to sell his “untraceable” underground compound for hundreds of millions of quid. Matthew, his intended customer, makes the point most of us are thinking – that pot will be legalized soon enough in the U.K., potentially devaluing the deal. This valid point, once raised, is never mentioned again.
But this figures. After years off the gangster path – with the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films, and most recently, Disney’s dull “live-action” Aladdin – Ritchie is looking back to the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla roots as if nothing has changed since. The Gentlemen is simply those movies with extra everything except inspiration. And sometimes more is less.
The Gentlemen. Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam and Hugh Grant. Opens wide, Friday, January 24.