Another dose of geezer-gangstery made all the more watchable by star turns from Matthew McConaughey and Hugh Grant
The gentlemen are also the players in this typically class-conscious film by writer-director Guy Ritchie, in which he returns to his signature style: the hyperactive geezer-gangstery ensemble caper or Chas’n’Dave fantasy crime procedural, the genre that made his name in the 1990s. It’s almost a time capsule for that era. Watching these poshos and villains and right lairy bastards, you could almost imagine that Tony Blair was once again hobnobbing with Noel Gallagher in No 10. This drama even features a baddie more associated with an era slightly older than that: a tabloid newspaper editor, played by Eddie Marsan, who is in charge of a horrible rag called the Daily Print. (The daily what?)
I enjoyed Ritchie’s tongue-in-cheek movie about King Arthur two years ago, and this wacky outing is pretty entertaining too, certainly better than his atrocious RocknRolla in 2008 or his tepid reboot of The Man from UNCLE in 2015 – although Ritchie ostentatiously includes a poster for that last film in one shot here, as if insisting on its neglected auteur meisterwerk status. The Gentlemen barrels cheerfully along like a 113-minute Madness video, and one reason it’s more watchable is that Ritchie doesn’t indulge his terrible habit of speeded-up montage scenes. Another reason is that it has Hugh Grant playing against type as an outrageously déclassé hacker-snoop turned screenwriter who reckons he has the goods on a drug baron, Mickey Pearson (played by Matthew McConaughey), and attempts to blackmail him into stumping up the cash to produce his film based on this mobster’s dirty dealings.