The Gentlemen (2020)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.
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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 .
Beyond regressive windbaggery, nothing justifies the two-hour running time: not the archaic soundtrack cues, nor the lame imitations of viral gang videos, nor the clanging late homage to 1980’s seminal Britflick “The Long Good Friday,” unfit to inhabit the same planet as its inspiration, let alone lace its boots.
A devoted fan of the crime genre, Ritchie peppers his script with a hefty dose of self-referential gags including a reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which Fletcher decrees as “a bit boring,” and John Mackenzie’s seminal 80s London gangster flick The Long Good Friday , which Ritchie has consistently taken heavy inspiration from.
This germ of an idea is that, whilst simultaneously being a homage to Ritchie’s own role in British film history, this is ultimately an ode to another crime classic; The Long Good Friday .
Asians, African-Americans, Jews and more are set up to be targets and punchlines and what is worse is that not only are the gags stretched to breaking point — a gag involving someone being called a “black bastard” and whether or not that is racist — but they are stolen from other projects i.e. the gag with the name Phuc is a gag from the teen comedy Superbad , the particular use of a pig is from the anthology TV series Black Mirror and of course, Ritchie’s insistent cribbing of the classic British crime flick The Long Good Friday (including the ending!) — which thankfully is not as blatant as it was in Rocknrolla.
The British gangster subgenre reached its peak 40 years ago with a lean, mean ditty called The Long Good Friday .
In another instance he even talks about how much he finds Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation boring.
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 .
Oh, and while he is at it, he should also learn that if you are going to make a joke about how boring Francis Coppola’s “The Conversation” is, as the Grant character does at one point, you should not do so in the context of a film that offers less entertainment than waiting for two solid hours for an actual screening of “The Conversation” to commence.
“Every movie needs a bit of action,” Fletcher notes, after narrating yet another dust-up; his throwaway diss of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (“wasn’t for me – a bit boring”) leads one to consider the extent to which he speaks for Ritchie himself.
Ritchie ladles on the meta-layers by allowing Fletcher to lay out his plan to extort Pearson like an elaborate film treatment, complete with insider-jokes about “35mm anamorphic”, blackout cuts and an aside about Francis Coppola’s classic eavesdropping movie, The Conversation .
Quentin Tarantino was the great prophet of the form, but Ritchie, and others’ films such as Get Shorty and Sexy Beast, kept it going.
But The Gentlemen feels less like a Ritchie movie and more like a derivation of a Ritchie movie with a pinch of Quentin Tarantino and a dash of Get Shorty tossed in.
As Fletcher reads out his script, occasionally embellishing things or reiterating details, the movie begins to resemble “Get Shorty” (all while making generous nods to “The Long Good Friday”), particularly with the movie-within-a-movie notes (paired with many of Ritchie’s own, previous gangster film earmarks, awash with fighting, favors, blackmail, cool threats, funny quips, and hard-boiled endeavors).
(For a subtler journey through such gradations, I recommend “The League of Gentlemen,” a British caper from 1960, about a gang of ex-soldiers, of varying ranks, who perpetrate a heist; in the opening shot, one of them emerges from a manhole, clad in a tuxedo, and gets into a Rolls-Royce.)
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Guy Ritchie, one of the late 90’s cult directors to emerge out of Europe from that generation impacted by films like “Pulp Fiction” and “Trainspotting,” had lost some of his wildness over the last decade.
And it’s sorta Tarentino-esque, especially in the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, the flashbacks and the cinephile-like salutes to other movies, including a nod to the trunk-POV scenes from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction , mentions of Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather (and his 1974 conspiracy thriller, The Conversation ), and even a passing shot of the movie poster of Ritchie’s own The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
When his pair of British crime capers released post- Pulp Fiction – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch – they heralded the arrival of a new, suave film-maker who could guarantee a good time in the multiplex.
If you can get past the constant “Pulp Fiction” knockoffs, it’s easy to see past the films need to backtrack on itself continuously.
And it’s sorta Tarentino-esque, especially in the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, the flashbacks and the cinephile-like salutes to other movies, including a nod to the trunk-POV scenes from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction , mentions of Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather (and his 1974 conspiracy thriller, The Conversation ), and even a passing shot of the movie poster of Ritchie’s own The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
The new Guy Ritchie movie is exactly like every other Guy Ritchie movie, which is to say it’s a lot like “Reservoir Dogs.”
All of the above barely scratches a tale that reminds me of “Layer Cake,” the 2004 Matthew Vaughn movie that played like a wannabe Guy Ritchie movie and which starred Daniel Craig as a cocaine dealer vainly attempting to retire.
I kinda like the knotty fun of that premise, a layer cake (but not Layer Cake ) of characters and double-crosses and quippy violence.
It has the brash, edgy attitude of Snatch and RocknRolla mixed with the campy, playful, energetic tone present in Sherlock Holmes and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and delivers something rather inspired.
Ritchie broke through in film with unique gangster films long on violence, raw language and humor in movies such as "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels," the beloved "Snatch" and "RocknRolla."
The Gentlemen isn't in the league of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, or the underrated RocknRolla.
All the while, Ritchie essentially celebrates the gentrification that’s gripped London in the 10 years since the release of his RocknRolla .
And that’s clearly where Ritchie is best at home, because the director hasn’t seemed this sure of himself since the days of at least RocknRolla.
After the big-budget misfire of King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword and the big-budget success of Aladdin , Ritchie’s 11th feature returns to his roots: the London-based crime milieu of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels , Snatch and RocknRolla .
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Sly devil that he is, Ritchie borrows a concept from A Chump at Oxford, the one in which an American comes to England and makes asses of the lads and lasses.
I still remember being brutally honest when I said, “Guy Ritchie is a one-trick pony” in my King Arthur review.
While this is prevalent in all of his films (even his less than good would-be-blockbusters like KING ARTHUR and ROBIN HOOD), it’s most prominent in his crime action comedies.
Leaving behind the VFX clutter that marked disasters like King Arthur and Aladdin , Ritchie returns to the guns ‘n’ geezers terrain that made his name, surveying the land before him with his old Tarantino-lite tricks.
But in the 20 years that followed, Ritchie did all of the following; made a terrible rom-com while in the throes of love with Madonna (Worst Picture Razzie winner Swept Away), took a brief detour into pretentiousness (Revolver), retooled both Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur to varying degrees of success, and most bafflingly of all, helmed a $180 million live-action Aladdin remake.
Blockbuster dreams came calling with the Robert Downey Jr.-starring “Sherlock Holmes” movies and an ill-fated “King Arthur.”
The film reunites Ritchie with his King Arthur: Legend of the Sword star Charlie Hunnam and returns the writer/director to his Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels rapid-fire expletive-filled roots.