Mark Reviews Movies: THE GENTLEMEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 24, 2020

An American expatriate, living in England and having created a marijuana empire, walks into a bar. That's how writer/director Guy Ritchie begins The Gentlemen, which stands as something of a return to his earlier films about a cast of eccentric characters, caught up in criminal schemes of which they have various degrees of comprehension. Anyway, the guy walks into a bar, and the punch line is that, as he sits to drink a pint and eat a pickled egg, someone behind him pulls out a gun. There's a gunshot, and the table is splattered with blood.

The whole of the movie is basically a long joke, in which information is presented without context, only for Ritchie to piece together the details for us at a later time. The fate of Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), the expat pot kingpin, seems set at the start, especially considering the number of characters who meet sudden deaths in the middle of assorted schemes. Mickey is right in the middle of one, we learn much later, when he sits down at the bar. The leader of a Chinese gang wants to get out of one—which he wasn't aware he was in, by the way—just before one of his henchmen shoots him in the head.

One guy, whose body is chilling in a freezer, certainly didn't think that fate would befall him when he went to hang out with a group of heroin addicts, who have the daughter of a lord in their apartment—not for ransom, although that might change in a week or so, considering their situation. This matters to Mickey, because the lord is one of the dozen who have provided their land for the growing of his marijuana supply—20 tons each year.

We're way ahead of the plot here, and in a way, that's fine. Ritchie's screenplay is only half concerned with the actual details. The other half of that concern, unfortunately, has little to do with these characters. It's mostly about when and how the filmmaker can answer a previously established mystery, add another unexpected twist, and make us re-consider which of these shady characters has the upper hand on the others.

The effect is akin to watching Ritchie tell us a shaggy-dog tale. Indeed, that's how the writer/director sets up this narrative, with a storyteller named Fletcher (Hugh Grant). He's a private investigator who was hired to look into Mickey's enterprise at the behest of a local tabloid editor (played by Eddie Marsan). Fletcher realized, though, that the information might be worth more money—£20 million in his mind—to Mickey's gang.

Lest one forgets, Mickey may or may not be dead at this point in the story, so Fletcher is trying to sell his tale (written out as a screenplay to boot) to Mickey's right-hand man Ray (Charlie Hunnam). Fletcher establishes his story as a movie—an old-fashioned one, with grain and grit on the picture (which Ritchie provides), as well as being shot in a wide aspect ratio (which Ritchie also does).

It's all so clever in that oh-so self-aware way, which is to say that Ritchie is banking his story's success primarily on our constant awareness of his storytelling abilities. Although it's probably not the case, there even might be something to the fact that Fletcher, played with goofy aplomb by Grant, is the most colorful character of this group. Even if it's unintentional, that fact is telling. The storyteller matters more in Ritchie's mind than the story itself, and from all of the trickery on display here (flashbacks and an unreliable narrator, who makes up things when he's missing information, and long-delayed revelations), it's pretty clear that the filmmaker believes that about himself, too.

The rest of the plot—again, told by Fletcher as blackmail of the wink-wink variety—involves Mickey, who has a violent past, trying to sell his empire to Matthew (Jeremy Strong), an American "Jewish cowboy" whose squeaky-clean history will come in handy when marijuana is inevitably legalized in the U.K. Getting in the way is Dry Eye (Henry Golding), a "Chinese James Bond," who hears about the possible sale and encourages Mickey's wife Rosalind (Michelle Dockery) to get him a meeting with the weed tycoon. Things don't go well, although Fletcher exaggerates Mickey's testicle-shooting reaction for dramatic effect.

There is a lot of plot here—not story, mind you, but down-and-dirty, cause-and-effect plot. The characters' personalities become bogged down in the winding and weaving narrative deceits, but there are some scenes when Ritchie just lets these characters show their personalities. Fletcher's evolving scheme, flirting with Ray as he tells his tale, is engaging, and Ray himself gets a lengthy scene in which he uses his calm demeanor to intimidate the heroin addicts. Colin Farrell plays a local boxing coach, whose young trainees get into trouble, and there's something refreshing about a character who puts himself in jeopardy to save people for whom he cares.

It's a story, though, that's really about how tricky and showy Ritchie can be when telling a story. The Gentlemen, then, is a case of a filmmaker indulging in his own eccentricities, not those of the characters.

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