After the overt “for the paycheck” movie that was the live action remake of Aladdin last year, Guy Ritchie has seen fit to re-prove his machismo-laden sense of identity to filmgoing audiences with what is largely being called a return to form by critics who have been forever committed to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as a benchmark for Ritchie and the case for his “auteur” status. While he’s stumbled a few times since his 1998 debut (with critics most notably panning his Madonna collab on 2002’s Swept Away, in addition to 2005’s Revolver, also influenced by his marriage with the pop icon, as evidenced by a Kabbalah allusion-heavy script), Ritchie has always managed to come back swinging (he loves a boxing metaphor, after all). It wasn’t until 2008 (incidentally, the year he and Madonna would announce their divorce, further causing tongues to wag that she was responsible for his creative slump all along), with RocknRolla, that Ritchie renewed faith in his gangster movie abilities.
The Gentlemen feels like equal parts the latter intermixed with his tried and true, Lock, Stock…, layered with not so subtle undertones at the center of it all that refer (reefer?) to how the unwarrantedly arrogant youth of the moment had best possess the means to back up their cocksureness if they’re going to so unpreparedly approach their elders in a dominance-asserting fashion. Perhaps one of the most flagrant initial instances of this running theme occurs with the first appearance of Colin Farrell’s character, called simply Coach, waiting for his food to be prepared at a local restaurant. With Ritchie employing every known stereotype about just how insolent and ruffian all adolescents of London are (the kind that pick on adults on the bus or corner them in weird, isolated tunnels that seem to be everywhere in the city), these children–for that’s what they are to Coach–do not make him bat an eyelash as he foils their knives with his bare hands and informs them that adults fight with their heads. That’s where the real war is. Encouraging them to throw wit-laden insults at him, all they can come up with is: fuck you. Like boomers with the OK Boomer “affront,” he is unimpressed with this lack of Gen Z thought.
After putting them in their places, they’re suddenly in awe when they realize he’s “The Coach.” Apparently his reputation for training misguided youths at a boxing facility precedes him. As an unwitting surrogate father to a group of “ragtag” would-be viral hip hop singers/dancers known as The Toddlers (incorporating their fighting moves into the act, always filmed for the internet, regardless of what illegal act they’re participating in), Coach doesn’t fathom the weight of the responsibility he’s taken on until The Toddlers cross American-born marijuana kingpin Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) in a major way by raiding one of his uber clandestine farms (all of which are hidden on private English estates of lords and ladies who have struck a deal with him to keep a share of the profits that will help them maintain the very expensive estate they’ve inherited). The order to do so came from a young and hungry (again, it’s all about “old” versus young in this film) rival member of another faction in town– run by Chinese boss Lord George (Tom Wu)–named Dry Eye (Henry Golding, faring better here than Last Christmas, just as Emma Thompson in Dolittle). Hearing of Mickey’s intent to get out of the game, he approaches the self-proclaimed lion with an offer to buy in cash that he’s certain Mickey won’t be able to refuse. Yet Dry Eye seems to be forgetting that Mickey is already in bed with fellow American and Jew (it’s important to call out the Jew part for later reasons and to make the first note of Ritchie’s continued penchant for slurs and acceptable British out-of-touchness), Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong), for the deal. One with a 400 million pound price tag attached to it–the irony being that an industry associated with such puerility is being taken so seriously by all parties involved.
Some of that money, naturally, is out of a pot (no pun intended) that a certain tabloid journalist called Fletcher (Hugh Grant, in the sleazoid role of his life) would love to dip into, requesting precisely twenty million pounds for his blackmail purposes, painting the cinematic portrait of why Mickey’s right-hand man, Raymond (Charlie Hunnam, forever Nicholas Nickleby to some), ought to encourage his boss to cough up. Persuading him to do so with his oh so elevator pitch-y (except far longer and more detailed) narrative designed to inform Raymond just how much he knows about the all the “fuckery afoot” (Mickey’s wife’s words, not Fletcher’s). Part of painting that portrait is describing Dry Eye as the “antagonist,” first and foremost because is the representation of the youth trying to make a power grab for it all when they know nothing about coming up the hard way like Mickey (who grew up “clever but poor” in America, only to finagle that cleverness into admission at Oxford thanks to the Rhodes scholarship, where he decided to use his acumen for more lucrative pursuits, i.e. selling weed to his fellow classmates). So it is that Dry Eye gets the description: “Our antagonist explodes on the scene like a millennial firework.” Of course, this dramatic interpretation is all for the purposes of the screenplay Fletcher has written about it.
As Fletcher regales Raymond with tales of some of the very recent crimes and fuck-ups he’s committed, he reflects back on Raymond going to a South London estate (for the unschooled, this is the very elegant English term for what is called a project in America). Enlisted to show up by Mickey, doing a favor for one of the blueblood families on whose property he grows his product, Raymond goes with the intent of plucking their heroin-addicted princess, Laura (Eliot Sumner, a.k.a. Sting and Trudie Styler’s daughter), out of the hole she’s gotten herself into. Aslan (Danny Griffin), the Russian friend of Laura’s Blake Fielder-Civil figure, Noel (Tom Rhys Harries), ends up falling out the window during the ensuing snafu as they remove Laura from the situation. Because youths are so damned cavalier they can’t even see fit to avoid a window that a henchman would so clearly throw him out of “on accident.”
With Aslan’s corpse on display, it’s up to Raymond to confiscate the phones of yet still more ruffians buzzing about like gnats on the estate. Chasing down they who had no second thoughts about taking selfies with the corpse (this sodding generation, one can picture Ritchie saying as he shakes his head tsk-ingly at Rocco), we’re met with the sound of El Michels Affair covering Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” in the background of the hijinks. It’s a song choice that punctuates the old versus young scenario, the new era repurposing that which was established by the old. And the new assuming they can do it all better by sheer virtue of inherent agility and “relevance.” But when Raymond catches up to the little twat who, you guessed it, leads him to some weird, creepy tunnel, he goads, “I’m sure you’re all roadmen, gangsters, proper naughty boys,” before asking one more time nicely for the phone with the picture of the dead geezer (to the Americans, that does not mean old man in this case) on it in exchange for cash. When they continue to test him, he pulls out his overpowering machine gun, reminding them, for all intents and purposes, “I’m big, you’re small; I’ve got clout and you don’t.” It’s a very psychological insight into the ever-increasingly clashing dynamic present in the generational power struggle.
The homemade vibe Ritchie parlayed into a blockbuster (by indie standards) success with Lock, Stock… is also visible from the outset with, at times, noticeable lo-fi sound quality and muted cinematography (or is that just London?). Yet The Gentlemen one-ups his modus operandi with a higher level of glossiness. At the same time, there is something particularly “I’m an insulated Englishman” about Ritchie’s approach to diversity in this movie. Though he makes the attempt at evolving the inherent white male “laddishness” of his films with the character of Rosalind Pearson (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery), Mickey’s beloved wife who is very much his trusted advisor while also running her own business, there’s something that feels hollow–decidedly male fantasy–about a woman who manages and oversees a body shop specifically for other women to bring their cars to (in fact, it sounds kind of like something Madonna would do–and actually kind of did in a performance of “Body Shop” from the 2015 Rebel Heart Tour). Nonetheless, Mickey lives and breathes for her–she is his only Achilles’ heel, the sole means by which any of his enemies could ever get to him. Something that will naturally come back to rear its “Chinaman” head later on. And yes, “Chinaman” is a word bandied a lot, as though we’re in a John Hughes movie. Phuc (Jason Wong)-related name jokes, indeed, are right on par with Long Duk Dong. And, of course, what would the presence of a Jewish manipulator trying to connivingly get the price down on something he wants to buy be without mention of Shylock (for, like all Brits, Ritchie is pointed when it comes to his Shakespeare references)? Explicitly when Mickey demands a pound of Matthew’s flesh as recompense for all the ways in which he’s wronged him and his empire.
And as Mickey is left no choice but to bare the fangs that are part and parcel of his lion’s roar (“In the jungle, the only way a lion survives is not by acting like a king, but by being the king”–the most Revolver-esque dialogue of all), he starts to remember that the only reason he’s really decided to retire is as a means to capitulate to his age (there can be no denying that “elderliness” was on Ritchie’s brain with this script, possibly made all the more palpable by the fact that he comes from a lineage of royal English blood wherein oldness is inherently steeped like tea into the body–in short, being “usurped” is a natural fear with his lot, and also part of why the Queen won’t die). Mickey admits at one point that he’s surrendering to his own self-gentrification, the kind that, in humans, is merely called middle-age. A softening. An acceptance that it doesn’t all have to be so hard. That one doesn’t constantly have to project an image of rough-hewnness in order to be accepted and bowed down to. Well, fuck that, he seems to say in his own juvenile way at one point after being provoked one too many times by everyone from Dry Eye to Fletcher. The only loyalty he can count on is that of Raymond’s and, oddly, The Toddlers, who offer up jester-like relief during such scenes as Ritchie ripping off the pilot episode of Black Mirror via some pig-human copulation implications involving a tabloid editor named Big Dave (Eddie Marsan)–obviously, not very big. It is Mickey’s snubbing of Dave at a high-brow lord and lady event that sets the latter off in terms of sicking Fletcher on him to dig up as much tabloid dirt as possible. And yes, Ritchie does undercuttingly tap into just how much of a ridiculous amount of power such British rags have over the people and those who govern them. With those controlling these papers and magazines being the billionaires with a staked interest in what gets covered and sanctioned to the masses, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that Big Dave could only be stopped with the threat of posting his pig-boning video on the internet. Because yes, Mickey is just that good at wielding his power in order to subjugate when necessary.
Swinging his own dick (an accusation made about Mickey as well) throughout the film, Ritchie offers the pièce de résistance of meta-ness with the final scene of the movie, in which Fletcher is at Miramax (the former Weinstein-helmed company Ritchie has no qualms about working with) pitching the idea for the script while a poster for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. looms in the background. Along with the promise of a sequel. One in which, more than likely, Ritchie will showcase his style to be outside the bounds of time and the alleged progression that comes with it–for the gangster caper is a genre that’s all about being timeless, age be damned. The same goes, one supposes, for how the British monarchy and all the lord/lady, duke/duchess, count/countess tentacles thereof see themselves. For to truly comprehend the phobicness of Ritchie’s England-set films (and yes, most of them take place there), one must also look to the culture of a country where youth is anything but a commodity.
