Film Review - The Gentlemen (18)

There's only one rule in the jungle: when the lion's hungry, he eats.

As sure as eggs in an Eastend pub are pickled, so Guy Ritchie is guaranteed to return - every few films - to the London-based crime drama. It made his name, after all, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch taking the 90s' Tarantino-inspired taste for pulp fiction and giving it a thoroughly Brit reworking. And he's never shaken his love of the sub-genre he helped shape, following up the serviceable live-action Aladdin he directed for Disney with this new Laaandan gangster epic. It's certainly as quotable and convoluted as his early efforts, but not of significantly greater depth.

In this latest underworld foray Matthew McConaughey is Mickey Pearson, an ex-pat American bad-boy plying his illegal trade in Blighty. Mickey, the owner of numerous cunningly concealed marijuana farms, is contemplating retirement from his empire. He appears to have the perfect buyer in suave cannabis 'Kingpin Mathew' (Jeremy Strong), but matters complicate fast when London Chinese gangster Dry Eye (Henry Golding) tries to muscle in. And then there's the unwelcome interest of seedy investigative journalist Fletcher (a whole new version of Hugh Grant) to contend with. As ever, life in Ritchie's criminal underworld is destined to get complex and messy.

In terms of pure craft this tall new tale has much to commend it. Admittedly it's like a fine-tuning of the knotty crime stories the director has told before - with its multi-stranded narrative, rogue's gallery of characters drawn from all social layers and arch use of voiceover. This time around the last of those is supplied by Grant in the film's often delicious framing scenes - a protracted piece of verbal fencing between creepy journo and McConaughey's right hand man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam). It's an artful device, allowing story threads to be drawn together wittily as the characters spar. (Hugh has endless fun with the kind of weaselly role he'd never have been granted - ha! - in his pretty-boy youth.)

The main narrative is pacy and funny, ducking and diving between stately homes and concrete housing estates, as Mickey attempts to put his affairs in order. It's populated with actors playing against type: Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery as our antihero's East London girlfriend Rosalind, Golding as a genuinely nasty piece of crime-family work and Colin Farrell as - well - the drily humorous and totally Colin Farrell-esque gym owner 'Coach'. They're written with panache and steered towards a wildly careering and inevitably violent conclusion.

All of which brings me to the 'but', one that prevents me from concurring with the film's high audience rating on IMDb. For all its sharply-crafted tale telling and buckets of style, The Gentlemen ultimately feels hollow. Yes there's a perfecting of the style that Ritchie employed back in Lock, Stock..., but there's no sense of his writing having matured thematically. There are the nasty bad-guys we dislike and the cool ones we root for. There's the colourful banter, revelling in its own un-pc nature. There are casual atrocities played as gags. It all elicits laughter for sure, but carries little dramatic weight, a flaw only accentuated by the the film's obvious homage to classic British gangster flick The Long Good Friday. (Now that had serious dramatic weight.) Oh, and I can't lie - the accumulation of racial and homophobic humour in the dialogue becomes plain uncomfortable by the end. 

There's no doubt about it - this further jaunt around Guy Ritchie's knowingly artificial world of Brit-crime is entertaining. But contrast it with the elegaic tone of Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, the latest from the man with whom his early career was most readily compared, and there's a sense of the London lad not having gone that far. The criminals here may be classier and the production more slick, but that's all that's changed. The Gentlemen exhibits talent at every point, but in the end it's throwaway.

Gut Reaction: Interest throughout and quite a lot of laughter - but it also left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

Memorable Moment: Colin Farrell's chip shop take-down.

Ed's Verdict: 6.5/10. It's cleverly written, tightly made and there's undeniable enjoyment in the watching. But at points it's unpleasant and in the end it's pretty empty.