The Gentlemen: Film Review
It was good to see Guy Ritchie returning to his gangster roots and doing what he does best – a crime caper – but The Gentlemen just wasn’t my cup of tea.
The film stars an ensemble cast headed up by Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Pearson, an American who moved to the U.K. as a student and has been cultivating his weed business for years and is now a major player in the drugs industry. He plans to sell his business to American Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong), but Dry Eye (Henry Golding) also wants a piece of the action, while The Coach’s (Colin Farrell)’s boxing students get involved in the drug gang warfare.
It took me such a long time to get into The Gentlemen because it begins with Hugh Grant‘s sleazy tabloid investigator trying to blackmail Mickey’s right-hand man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) with a film script detailing the dirt surrounding Mickey’s business, and I wasn’t 100% sure if he was telling the truth and it was a story we were supposed to be investing in. It takes a long time to get going and set up the premise and the characters but then it becomes quite fun – but not as much fun as I was hoping for. I wasn’t particularly gripped by the story, but the characters and certain moments of dialogue were excellent.
The star of the show for me was Grant, well and truly throwing his posh stereotype out the window in favour of a common geezer character. It was so weird hearing his new accent and seeing him play so against type, but he was my favourite without a doubt. He seemed to be truly relishing the role. I also enjoyed Farrell as the innocent boxing coach caught up in the gangster warfare – I loved his look, him using his Irish accent and a lot of his dialogue was stellar. My next favourite was Michelle Dockery. Like Grant, she’s known for playing posh and she gets to be this sassy Essex woman and the perfect wife to Mickey. She holds her own and isn’t one to be messed with. I wanted more from Golding, but that’s not his fault – he wasn’t given enough opportunity to do more.
I don’t consider myself to be particularly soft but I really dislike the C-bomb and Ritchie really loved using it in this movie. I swear it’s the most C-bombs I’ve ever heard in one film! It also loses its effectiveness when it’s thrown around so easily. Like Snatch and Lock, Stock, The Gentlemen makes full use of the Cockney geezer talk and offensive lad chat, which is fun at times but could have done without the racist remarks. It has a couple of unexpected action moments that I enjoyed and I did laugh out loud a handful of times but this was nowhere near as exciting or fun as I expected it to be.
In cinemas now