The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie's new action-comedy The Gentlemen returns the 51-year-old writer-director to the stylized London gangster milieu where he first made his name two decades ago with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, only this time he brings the slickness and swagger he accumulated during his hit-and-miss Hollywood career, including this year's billion-dollar smash Aladdin. Featuring a stellar ensemble cast headed by Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant, Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery and Colin Farrell, Ritchie's homecoming is a fairly familiar affair but also refreshingly funny and deftly plotted, with more witty lines and less boorish machismo than his early work. Violence still plays a key role but mostly occurs offscreen, and the body count is surprisingly low.

First conceived a decade ago, The Gentlemen allows Ritchie to revisit that lurid fantasy version of Britain that has long been his comfort zone, where the English upper classes trade vice and villainy with criminal lowlife. While viewers may struggle to discern much dramatic depth or emotional maturity in this live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, it is certainly a guilty pleasure for the festive season, despite the occasional convoluted twist and off-color joke.

The beating comic heart of The Gentlemen is Grant, archly cast against type as Fletcher, a sleazy private investigator who makes a living digging up dirt on the rich and shameless for his crooked tabloid paymasters. Sporting a goatee, thick-rimmed glasses and a deliciously silly cockney accent, the aging matinee idol appears to be channeling prime-time Michael Caine here, but with an edge of camp menace behind his jovial surface cool. His casting is a particularly acute audience-winking joke since Grant has spent much of the past decade as a high-profile campaigner against gossip-chasing, phone-hacking newspapers in the U.K. He weighs up every wry line with relish, and Ritchie makes strong use of his deadpan comic talents.

In his early career, Ritchie was sometimes dismissed as a low-rent British Tarantino. The parallels were arguable then, but they make much more sense here. In common with most Tarantino films, The Gentlemen's soundtrack is a mixtape of pop classics old and new while the script is larded with verbose, discursive, highly mannered dialogue. One sequence, featuring a mobster locked in a car trunk, feels like a direct Tarantino homage. Running with the conceit that Fletcher is pitching this entire story as a movie script, the screenplay is also loaded with self-referential film jokes, including allusions to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and John Mackenzie's cult 1980 London gangster classic, The Long Good Friday. The poster for Ritchie's own The Man From U.N.C.L.E. even gets an audience-nudging cameo.

Ritchie frames the film's time-jumping, crazy-paving plot inside an extended duologue between Fletcher and Ray (Hunnam), the wily lieutenant to Mickey Pearson (McConaughey), a suavely ruthless American expat who discovered his true vocation as a drug dealer while studying at Oxford.

Now a moneyed, middle-aged, well-connected businessman married to cockney ice queen Rosalind (Dockery), Pearson is craving the quiet life and planning to sell off his vast drug empire for a hefty retirement fee. But the deal is threatened by the shifty power play between would-be buyer Matthew (Jeremy Strong) and his brutally ambitious Chinese rival Dry Eye (Henry Golding), not to mention a colorful Dickensian chorus of artful dodgers, boxers, rappers, junkie rock stars and murderous Russian oligarchs.

The Gentlemen is too cheerfully shallow to merit much serious critique. Overall, it fulfills its primary function as an effortlessly entertaining caper, with Ritchie and Grant both doing their funniest work in years.

MovieStyle on 01/24/2020