Guy Ritchie returns to his stomping ground after the gargantuan Disney live action ALADDIN (2019), in THE GENTLEMEN, it is an underworld infested with illegal cannabis business, skulduggeries of blackmaiing, bullying and hustling, turf war and insidious double-crossing.
American Mickey Pearson (McConaughey) is the typical rags-to-riches fellow who builds his cannabis criminal enterprise ex nihilo in UK, now it is time for him to retire and cash in his affluent business into shekels, so he finds a potential buyer in fellow American, the billionaire Matthew Berger (Strong), but the latter is too canny to pay in full, whereupon, many parties are embroiled into the feeding frenzy, including a bumptious young Chinese mafia underboss Dry Eye (a hectoring and snaring Golding, trying a shade too hard to expand his range), a MMA trainer named Coach (Farrell, utterly sincere and means business), belittled editor of the tabloid Daily Print, Big Dave (Marsan), and private investigator Fletcher (Grant), plus a cohort of MMA fighters and YouTubers, among others.
Actually the film unspools from a frame story where Fletcher blackmails from Raymond (Hunnam), Mickey's right-hand man for the kompromat he gleans and demands a lump sum of £20 million, and Ritchie makes a jolly attempt of injecting many a homoerotic banter and teaser between them, with Raymond putting on a poker face to countervail Fletcher's salacious innuendos, and it results in one of Grant's most unstrained, jocular performances, although eventually he cannot outfox his more relaxed opponent, as Hunnam absorbs all the jests with a tongue- in-cheek admittance, certain demographic is surely being mollycoddled.
On the whole, Ritchie safely reverts to his blokeish, laddish idiom what is his claim to fame, toying with meta-references of movie-making, inverting pre-seen incidents with a less disconcerting and much expected outcome, juggling rapidly-edited montages with rapid-fire characters, it is a sleek-looking (top-line sartorial dedication), well-constructed, adrenalin-rush inducing artifact that is less gore than it portends, more leans on coups de théâtre to keep its audience hooked, and it is so pleasing that Matthew McConaughey is some sort back to his game with equally pleasing swagger and wiles, although female roles are meager, Michelle Dockery's unfazed gangster moll mockney is a good finding, but has barely anything meaty at her disposal, however, mostly egregious , what irrevocably mars THE GENTLEMEN is its blatant racist implication,between the images of a twice projectile-vomiting Chinese crime boss being outsmarted in his own lair by his white rivals and an inconsolable aristocratic father who is wailing for the demise of his drug-addled white trash daughter, Ritchie's connotation of racial preference is pointedly too grating to overlook.
referential entries: Ritchie's THE MAN FROM UNCLE (2015, 7.3/10), SNATCH (2000, 7.1/10).
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