Netlix’s The Gentlemen lets Guy Ritchie get back to basics and perfect his vibe
Guy Ritchie is a more dexterous filmmaker than people give him credit for. Sure, all his movies are similar in spirit — kinetic action movies with a wry sense of Extremely British Humour, but his deftness comes at knowing which element of his style needs to be emphasized for each particular project. Just last year he released two movies, The Covenant and Operation Fortune, with wildly different tones — Operation Fortune skewing more toward screwball comedy, and The Covenant being an excellent and serious look at the tensions of wartime bureaucracy. But even appreciating all that filmmaking flexibility, his fantastic new series on Netflix, The Gentlemen, lets Ritchie get back to his U.K. crime roots and refine the vibes he does best.
Despite having the same title as a previous Ritchie movie, The Gentlemen isn’t exactly a direct sequel or remake of the film. Instead, it’s more spiritually linked specifically via the connections of drugs, boxing, and British dynastic wealth — three things Ritchie has always seemed fascinated by as an artist.
The show follows Eddie (Theo James), a former soldier who gets pulled out of the military when his father dies so he can take over his dukeship, which his father passed onto him instead of his older brother. While the title itself is a surprise, the bigger shock comes when Eddie discovers that his seemingly law-abiding father had been renting his land to a drug empire for the last several years, a business venture Eddie is keen to extricate the family from as fast as possible. Something he can only do, of course, by committing quite a few crimes in the process.
The Gentlemen should feel instantly recognizable to anyone who’s seen Ritchie’s earlier work, particularly Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch. The show is full of gangsters with Coen brothers criminal buffoonery and Tarantino-movie mouths.
Where it diverges from those early Ritchie movies is in its level of focus, at least in the first few episodes that I’ve
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