Review: Can Guy Ritchie Recapture the Magic in The Gentlemen?
The Gentelment. Image courtesy of STXfilms.
Guy Ritchie’s filmography has been such an interesting study in career trajectories. I will never forget watching Snatch and being blown away. It was such a purely experiential joy, fast and loud and fun and hip. I was probably 15 when I saw it, and it left an inedible mark because it opened my eyes to what cinema could be and I still think it’s an all-time great. He tried, with RocknRolla, to recapture the magical stylized London gangsterism of Lock Stock and Snatch, but didn’t quite make it. Then he took a hard turn toward mainstream Hollywood fare with Sherlock Holmes, tried something new with The Man From U.N.C.L.E., before going back to the Hollywood money-printing machine with the surprisingly not terrible Aladdin. Along the way he married and divorced Madonna and made a film starring her, called Swept Away, which won a Golden Raspberry and is well-known for being a piece of absolute shit.
He also made a truly bizarre film, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword which was meant to be some kind of fusion between his grimy crime thriller roots and a mega-blockbuster fantasy franchise that suffered from an incurable case of “What the fuck kind of movie is this supposed to be?” Unfortunately, it was a terminal case (it was probably the studio’s fault, I am assuming based on no evidence). And now, after traveling that strange road, he has once again returned to his roots, making a film with all the gangster hallmarks of a Lock Stock or a Snatch. Can he recapture the magic?
Sure!
As anyone with an ounce of Guy Ritchie knowledge can tell you, The Gentlemen is a clear callback to Lock Stock and Snatch. It references the films directly, particularly when Coach defends the use of the term “pikey.” That is basically Guy Ritchie emerging out of the screen and defending his use of the term two decades ago, which I only learned last year at dinner with an Irish person was considered offensive. The movie is stacked with quality acting talent, a hip (if a little bit more subdued) energy, and dialogue that you could wrap yourself up in like a bathrobe.
If anything, the film is basically a showcase for an older more mature (?) Guy Ritchie. It’s less about kinetic energy and being cool, then luxuriating in convoluted dialogue. The narrative structure is a bit weird - but I think this might have been because Hugh Grant was so good playing against type as the slimey Fletcher that the director just couldn’t resist giving him more screen time than the narrative demanded. Once it really gets going around the mid-point, it is vintage Guy Ritchie, if tempered just a bit by the wisdom (?) of age.
Does The Gentlemen recapture the magic of Snatch? No. But that’s an impossibly high bar, and that was 20 years ago. When you set the bar so high it’s really hard to keep clearing it with subsequent films, and I cannot fault him for it. This movie tells a classic, and twisty, Guy Ritchie story with characters that are goofy, compelling, well-acted and given choice dialogue and scenes to just act. That is, perhaps, why he was able to recruit so much marquee talent. Actors like a director who will give them good material and let them run with it. And run they do.
So ultimately, it’s not really about if Guy Ritchie can recapture the magic. There are echoes of the magic all throughout this movie (which immediately got hammered by fun-hating people for being full of offensive stuff). And for me, that was enough to find it very enjoyable. And my wife, who is Indonesian and has never seen Lock Stock or Snatch, said she loved it. Like she was blown away. Or, dare I say, swept away? I felt the same way about Snatch, having never seen Lock Stock. This suggests to me that the magic of a Guy Ritchie gangster film really sets in the first time you see it. After that, you know the score, so the effect is diminished a bit because capturing magic once is thrilling; by the second or third time, it’s routine. This isn’t a knock on Guy Ritchie. It’s a knock on the diminishing returns of the magic capture industry.
