The Gentlemen is the latest movie from writer/director Guy Richie and marks his return to the British street crime genre for the first time since 2008’s RocknRolla. In the interim, he has directed two Sherlock Holmes films, a failed King Arthur “reboot”, the live-action Aladdin film and the criminally under-seen The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After over a decade, he seems to very naturally slip back into the feel of things. The violence, the non-linear story-telling, the uncouth and frankly uncomfortable vulgarity; it’s all here. In all this time it’s refreshing to see he hasn’t really changed. Unfortunately for him, however, most everyone else has.
This time around, Richie is weaving a tale of marijuana entrepreneur Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) as he attempts to sell off his business and exit the industry. What ensues is a multi-layered tangle of intrigue and shenanigans as the various parties both directly and indirectly involved scramble to take advantage of the situation.
The film is structured mostly as a narrated recounting of events by private detective Fletcher (Hugh Grant) as he explains the different angles to the goings-on to Mickey’s right-hand man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), not necessarily told in chronological order and sometimes skewed by his own biases. This not only allows for Richie to showcase his penchant for taking straight-forward stories and making them needlessly complicated but also ties everything together in a narrative sense by having the majority of the events filtered through the same lens. While Fletcher isn’t involved in a lot of the actual plot of the film, we still learn a decent bit about him through his narration of the events.
Among the sizable cast of the film, the two standouts for me were Michelle Dockery as Mickey’s hard-as-nails wife and business partner Rosalind and Colin Farrell as Coach, an MMA trainer who gets embroiled in the whole mess when his apprentices target Mickey’s business. Having never seen Downton Abbey, I was completely unfamiliar with Dockery and was completely blown away by the ruthlessness she injected into the character with her frightening Cockney accent. For Farrell, on the other hand, while he doesn’t get a whole lot of screen time, his scenes were far and away the most successful bits of levity and comic relief in the film. Farrell is a perfect match for Richie’s style of dialogue and I think it might have something to do with his Irish accent. Maybe everything I enjoyed about this movie can be boiled down to the accents?
If you’re a fan of RocknRolla, Snatch, or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels then you’ll more than likely pick up on what Richie’s putting down in The Gentlemen. While I do enjoy his films, I’d say this is probably the weaker of the bunch, possibly getting the edge over RocknRolla. Compared to the rest, this one also feels a little lighter on the action and instead employs a lot of cutting away from the “good bits” as a way to transition between scenes. I can also see a lot of modern audiences not jiving with a lot of the off-color jokes in the film. But that’s to be expected with a film so clearly uninterested with living outside of 2004.
6