King of the Kush Mountain

I’ve talked about Guy Ritchie’s films a few times in the past. When I started this site I didn’t expect to go in depth on certain directors, finding a way through their repertoire of films as I meander through my movie collection, and yet, once in a while a director stood out, and Ritchie was one of them. I grabbed his early films, Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, back when I worked at a video store, and then kept watching his various movies whenever another came out. He quietly became one of those directors I “watched” without me even realizing it.

It really was simple, though. He’s a director with style who can tell solid and effective films with a bit of flash and a quick bit of wit. It all worked, really, and that made him someone I could rely on. Along with his down-to-earth crime films he also made one of the better Disney remakes, Aladdin, and a couple of decent Sherlock HolmesOften cited as the world's greatest (fictional) detective, this character was introduced in 1887 (in A Study in Scarlet) and has gone on to appear in hundreds of stories, films, shows, and more. movies. Not everything he’s touched has been solid gold (Swept Away is awful, and everyone seems to hate Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre), but he’s far more reliable than the likes of, say, Matthew Vaugh or Zack SnyderOften reviled for the bombastic and idiotic content of his films, there is no question that what Snyder's movies lack in substance they (at least try to) balance out with flash and style, making him one of Hollywood's top directors... sadly., and a director like Zucker-Abrahams-ZuckerComing up horror movies and genre cheapies, this director made his name with the Resident Evil series of films before becoming, seemingly, the go-to for Hollywood adaptations of video games. could only dream of making films half as slick as Ritchie.

Despite this, somehow The Gentlemen slipped right under my radar. It’s funny, because I even knew there was a NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). spinoff, also called The Gentlemen, and yet I hadn’t yet gotten around to seeing the film. Netflix helpfully informed me of this when the film was soon to leave the streamer, and figuring, “well, at this point I’ve watched and reviewed almost everything from the director, may as well watch this”, I popped the film on and got to filling out my list of his films. In for a penny and all that.

The film opens in medias res with our apparent main character, Michael "Mickey" Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), heading into a pub in London to grab a pint. He gets a call from his wife about dinner, but that call is interrupted by a gunshot, seemingly killing Mickey in the middle of his call. We then jump ahead to later on the timeline with Mickey’s right hand man, Raymond Smith (Charlie Hunnam), getting an unwelcome visit in his house from journalist and real weasel of a man, Fletcher (Hugh Grant). Fletcher was put onto the case of Mickey by his editor, “Big” Dave (Eddie Marsan), who, in a previous interaction with Mickey, had felt slighted. He wanted dirt on the man, and Fletcher was the one to get it. And he did. Lots of it.

As it turned out, Mickey was the largest marijuana dealer in all of England. He had farms of it hidden everywhere, in multiple locations that no one could easily find. He kept everything tight and had a good racket going, but he was looking to get out of the business after a few decades of running the scene, get all respectable. He had a buyer, Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong), that he was looking to sell his whole business to for $400 Mil. He just needed things to go right… and then things didn’t. One after another, little incidents were happening, and it seemed like someone was out to ruin the deal. And that’s where Fletcher comes in as he knows the who’s who and the what’s what, and knowing what he knows he wants his payout or everything goes to Big Dave and Mickey’s whole operation goes pear-shaped. $20 Mil or he talks. And that’s where Smith has to make a choice. Pay the man or watch his boss’s business go up in flames. Or so we think…

The Gentlemen is a twisty film. It starts you off at a point early on (but late in the story) where you think you know how everything will end. A mob boss gets a gun to his head and ends up dead. We think it’s the story of how we got to that point, and it kind of is. And yet, at the same time, it’s far more than that, and the twists and turns drive the story in a number of unexpected ways that really move everything around. I’m trying very hard not to spoil it, of course, since the twists and turns are what drive the film, keeping the audience on the edge of catching on to all the ways the film is moving around so that unexpected things keep surprising them. The thrill of the twists is most of the fun.

With that said, the film may be just a little too twisty for its own good. I wouldn’t say it’s as bad about it as, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, a film that seems to exist solely to create one twist after another with no real reason beyond, “this is twisty!” but it certainly has a few moments that stretch credulity. There are a couple of saves later in the film (without spoiling anything) that seem to happen simply because the director doesn’t want to lose certain characters, and then there’s a big late-stage twist that comes out of nowhere and is meant to recontextualize everything but really feels like bad writing. That one stung especially because, up to that point, I was really grooving on the film. That late stage major twist felt like it was unnecessary and also like a massive cheat.

I think it all really stems from the fact that Ritchie really likes these thuggish, criminal characters and wanted them to survive. He has a massive cast of characters that, clearly, he wants to keep around and revisit (even if most of them don’t appear in the spin-off of the same name) and he felt hard pressed to let them all go. I get the instinct, the need to keep most of your cast around so you can play with the action figures again later. Maybe some new idea will come and he’d want to have this whole world, and all its richly detailed characters, around for more fun. If he didn’t have these guys to play with, what would he do?

This is predicated on two things, though. The first is that we’ll actually like all of these characters and want to hang out with them for a second go-round. I don’t really know if that’s the case. There are certain characters I do like, mind you. I enjoyed McConaughey's Mickey, the improbable Texan (complete with standard drawling, McConaughey accent) leading a pot empire in England because McConaughey frequently can carry a film just on his charisma alone. I also really liked Colin Farrell as "The Coach", a late film addition who steals every scene he’s in. Some of these characters I would like to see again in a new context.

Other characters, though, don’t really thrill me. Hugh Grant's Fletcher is a complete shit-heel of a man. Yes, that’s the point of the character, but he’s so weasley and unpleasant, and he’s in so many parts of the film that I felt myself dreading every time he came back. And I also wasn’t really that interested in Charlie Hunnam's Raymond Smith. I know Hunnam can be a good actor, and it seems like Ritchie feels the same as he cast him not just in this 2019 film but also in his previous movie, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. In neither case did I see anything that made me really feel like he was an actor to watch. He lacks the charisma, the presence, that ability to make a character feel alive and interesting. Grant can do that but he’s wasted on an asshole, but Hunnam just doesn’t have it here.

So no, I don’t like specific characters, and that drives the second problem with keeping these guys around: what story is there to tell? Ritchie clearly wanted to tell further stories set in this world, and keeping this whole cast of characters alive (or most of them anyway) would imply they’d be back for spinoffs. All the twists and turns lead to that outcome, you would think. And yet we got a TV series set in this world and none of the characters from the film (love them or hate them) appear. So why all the twisting just to get to a desired result. I do not have an answer for that.

The Gentlemen has all the slickness and smooth production you expect from a Ritchie film, and for huge chunks of it that’s enough to carry the movie. It’s a very classic feeling Ritchie film, with the twists, turns, and sly asides you expect. But Ritchie goes too hard, adding on layers upon layers, twists upon twists, until it all feels like it teeters and falls apart. I liked the film for what it was, but there just wasn’t enough good momentum going to carry me through an ending that felt forced and weirdly aligned. I wanted to like this film because it’s Ritchie and it was nearly working for a while, but the end result feels like less than all the solid pieces it had going in. This is a misfire that didn’t need to be quite so bad, and I’m not certain how you could save it short of taking it away from the director and trying again.

Except then it wouldn’t be a Guy Ritchie film and I’m not certain it would work nearly as well. I guess a misfire from him is still better than some shit other directors would crank out instead.