by Jo Ann Skousen
Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen offers old-school cool with an all-star cast and a complex script that eventually relaxes into a pretty good movie. It’s heavy on dialogue, heavy on atmosphere, and heavy on heavies (you’ll need a cast of characters to keep them all straight). But it’s a lot of fun, too.
Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is our first heavy. He’s a cool, sophisticated, ex-pat drug king with a Texas drawl and a short-term problem: for years he’s been rescuing British gentry from financial ruin and making a fortune for himself by renting their isolated, underutilized land to build even more isolated underground weed-growing factories. But with drug legalization looming in Britain, Mickey realizes he’s going to have to change his business model. Marijuana will still be profitable, but within legitimate markets. Mickey thinks his reputation will sully the business when it goes legit. With his underworld background, he won’t be the proper face for a legitimate above-ground company. When he offers to sell his business to Matthew (Jeremy Strong), it triggers a new territorial war among the drug lords in town. Everyone wants a chance to take over Mickey’s assets.
Ray (Charlie Hunnam) is Mickey’s first lieutenant, the one who watches over his boss and his holdings and cleans up any messes. Yeah, he’s heavy too, and just as cool as the proverbial cucumber—or the head currently cooling in his freezer (and I don’t mean lettuce). He comes home one evening to find Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a private detective who specializes in discovering dirt and selling it to the dirt-maker, waiting in the shadows. Fletcher slaps a script called “The Bush” onto the table and demands $20 million for the story he is about to tell—a clever way to launder an extortion deal (and one used frequently, these days, by politicians and publishers). Fletcher is about to narrate the movie that we are about to see, while also pitching the story to a producer in side-flashes. It’s old-school school with a self-reflective postmodernist vibe, rather like the Get Shorty style of filmmaking in the 1990s.
Mickey’s wife Rosalind (Michelle Dockery) runs a high-class mechanic shop staffed by skilled female mechanics catering to high-class women who drive high-octane cars. Rosalind is sleek and cool, arriving for work in her skinny, ankle skimming black slacks that show off her glamorous red-soled stilettos. (Come to think of it, this is the third review this month in which I’ve mentioned red-soled stilettos. Have Christian Louboutins become a Hollywood pedestrian caricature?) Wanting to enjoy a respectable, above-board life with Rosalind is one reason Mickey wants to get out of the drug business.
Other heavies include Coach (Colin Farrell), a recovering Irish tough who now runs a boxing gym to help rehabilitate wayward young men, and who asserts, “I train lads to be good lads—I’m not a gangster,” as he nevertheless heads into the fray; Lord George (Tom Wu), the head of a competing drug cartel; and Dry Eye (Henry Golding), who also wants a piece of the action. British rapper Bugzy Malone plays one of the young men from Coach’s gym—be sure to stay through the credits to watch his music video.
Vulgar language is pervasive, and for a script so laden with self-aware dialogue, this lack of originality is rather pathetic. It often feels like boys in a schoolyard standoff lobbing insults while hoping they seem big and scary enough to dissuade the other side from actually throwing a punch—or pulling a gun.
Guns shouldn’t be a problem in this schoolyard, of course, because The Gentlemen is set in England, where guns are illegal. And to be sure, low-level thugs in this movie carry knives or engage in martial arts instead of pulling a gun. But this is Hollywood’s Britain, so there will be blood — lots of it. If ever there was a PSA for the aphorism “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” this movie is it.
So there’s your cast of characters. Sit back and enjoy act three—it’s like cotton candy at an amusement park, full of sweet thrills but kind of empty and forgettable as soon as it’s done. But that’s OK—I love thrill rides. And cotton candy won’t rot your teeth unless you chew on it.
The Gentlemen, directed by Guy Ritchie. STX, 2019, 113 minutes.
Jo Ann Skousen is the founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival, where debate is civil and freedoms are large. Paris Resort Las Vegas, July 13-16, 2020. Information about tickets and submissions is available here.
