After the vast underperformance of
2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and the hefty overperformance of
May’s Aladdin, we rejoin Guy Ritchie trying to ground himself via a
return to his roots. The
Gentlemen is the kind of cor-blimey-what-a-carve-up
shaggy-dog yarn that Ritchie spun with diminishing returns before the
tantalising paycheques of franchise cinema were dangled his way: a hard-R
venture, populated by RADA graduates pointing weapons and cursing at one
another between elaborate doublecrosses. The difference is that its director is
now in a position to equip this cobblers with the budgetary heft of an American
indie (The Gentlemen emerges under the apparently deathless Miramax banner)
and an altogether starrier ensemble. The problem is that at no point does
Ritchie seem to have realised such material is still, on a fundamental level,
cobblers.
On screen, the story is slapped
together by a hack journalist; it feels like it. Hugh Grant’s lisping, seedy
reporter Fletcher shows up one night in the kitchen of criminal fixer Raymond
(Charlie Hunnam) and lays out the tall tale of one Mickey Pearson: a
tweed-wearing Californian (played by Matthew McConaughey) who gained a foothold
in London society by dealing primo weed, then met his downfall upon snubbing Fletcher’s
editor (Eddie Marsan) at a cocktail party. For no reason other than it allows
Ritchie to work in some of that sub-Tarantino postmodernism he hasn’t yet
outgrown, Fletcher has written this saga up in screenplay form, so Mickey’s
misadventures are presented as highlights from an especially salacious pitch. “Every
movie needs a bit of action,” Fletcher notes, after narrating yet another
dust-up; his throwaway diss of Coppola’s The Conversation (“wasn’t for
me – a bit boring”) leads one to consider the extent to which he speaks for Ritchie
himself.
The Gentlemen is soon overrun with varyingly lively stereotypes,
shuffled before us like shell game cups. Downton’s Michelle Dockery is
Pearson’s stern-faced moll, mostly secondary until an attempted rape shot with
typical Ritchie sensitivity; Colin Farrell a Burberry-clad boxing coach who
gets the best gag (a slur on the South London backwater of Croydon) before
receding from sight; Succession’s Jeremy Strong the Jewish banker
bankrolling Pearson’s operations. You can see why these actors were drawn here
– they get fistfuls of lines – but Ritchie is clearly more interested in some
than he is in others. Grant at least has disreputable fun at the expense of those
journos who’ve crossed him, yet a coasting McConaughey renders Mickey an
uninteresting cypher whose Zen koans (“Doubt causes chaos, and one’s own
demise”) revive the unfortunate memory of Ritchie’s existential-drama-but-with-Jason-Statham
misfire Revolver from 2005.
A limitation is that these
characters are constructed entirely of hot air, the kind of posturing bollocks
men have traditionally spouted in drab London boozers. Ritchie is evidently
enjoying being off the PG-13 leash: cue an anal sex joke every minute, persistently
mirthless play on Mickey’s weed strain “Bush”, and a drawn-out sequence involving
a character named Phuc. Fail to snort, however, and you might notice how
reactionary the banter is. Mickey’s whinge about hikers chimes with the image
of Ritchie the aspirant country squire; a crack Fletcher aims at Chinese
mobster Henry Golding – “ricence to kill” – intends to signal racist character,
but also feels like a low blow intended to nudge an easy laugh out of those
bulletheaded bruisers who’ve felt empowered by recent developments in the
Brexit saga.
Beyond regressive windbaggery, nothing
justifies the two-hour running time: not the archaic soundtrack cues, nor the lame
imitations of viral gang videos, nor the clanging late homage to 1980’s seminal
Britflick The Long Good Friday, unfit to inhabit the same planet
as its inspiration, let alone lace its boots. So we wind up pondering once
again the mystery of the Ritchie career: how a filmmaker who’s notched up at
least four major duds (2002’s Swept Away, 2005’s Revolver, 2015’s
The Man from U.N.C.L.E., King Arthur) and rarely risen above time-killing
mediocrity in his hits continues to make the movies he wants to make. Is he the
cinema’s most prominent example of white privilege? Or, like almost everyone on
screen here, does he have incriminating photographs of the rich and powerful?
For all that the much-papped Ritchie
may retain some idea about the evils of newspapermen, The Gentlemen itself
trades in a very tabloidy view of Britain, down to a final gotcha involving the
same snortingly sensational smear that circled a recent Tory Prime Minister. Peddling
such raspberry-blowing nonsense might earn a tyro director the reputation of a
scrappy, iconoclastic underdog; two decades and several million dollars into Ritchie’s
career, it feels heavily cynical, a crass attempt to give that part of his
fanbase who found Aladdin wussy something closer to what they might
want. We get the films we deserve, some say. Visually unexceptional when it’s
not plain squalid, shameless in its bid for a sequel, The Gentlemen is
the film Britain deserves as it staggers backwards into the New Year under the
questionable influence of an unabashedly populist leader. America: save
yourselves.
Grade: C-
The Gentlemen opens in cinemas nationwide today.
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