The Gentlemen

Synopsis: A London drug lord (Matthew McConaughey) tries to sell off his highly profitable business to rivals

Guy Ritchie made a stellar debut with Lock. Stock & Two Smoking Barrels in 1998 and bar his follow-up, Snatch  (2000) has continued to disappoint in greater (RocknRolla, 2008) and lesser (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., 2015) degrees ever since. His latest film whose title evokes the classic 1960 Ealing Studio caper comedy, The League of Gentlemen, but shows little evidence of gentlemanly behaviour, falls somewhere about midway of that spread of also-rans

Returning to the London underworld, the turf in which he made his name The Gentlemen is a marvel of Byzantine plotting but compared to his first two films the characters are mostly not as engaging, the idiomatic dialogue too often rings hollow and the action set pieces are largely underwhelming. What is left is entertaining enough in a gimmicky way but only just.

Ritchie’s script is so convoluted that it needs the almost continuous narration of a Cockney private investigator called Fletcher (Hugh Grant in a rewardingly uncharacteristic role) who is trying to blackmail marijuana overlord Mickey Pearson (McConaughey) to pay him £20m via his consigliere Ray (Charlie Hunnam). There’s no point in trying to summarize what happens in the film but suffice it to say that it unfolds in the kinetic style Ritchie trade-marked with L, S & TSB. Part of the problem compared to that film, however, is that Ritchie's script seems to be playing to some kind of global marketing strategy.

McConaughey is an American who has made the big time in the British drug trade and is trying to sell his empire to another American while a Chinese gangster(Henry Golding) tries to muscle in on the deal. Only Michelle Dockery as Mickey’s wife and Grant represent the East End patois that Ritchie struck gold with, but both of them, more so Grant than Dockery, are lightweights compared to their reprehensible forebears. Colin Farrell’s designer leisurewear sporting boxing coach too, whilst an amusing highlight, is symptomatic of the sense of a formula taken to supposedly crowd-pleasing excess.

The Gentlemen is an exercise in cleverness. It’s flash and it's fast but it's also eminently forgettable.

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