I hadn’t heard of ‘The Gentlemen’, a film directed by Guy Ritchie until my brother recommended it to me. This flick has an admirable cast – I mean obviously, Guy Ritchie has all the money to draw some biggies. There is Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrel, Hugh Grant and Henry Golding who became famous after starring in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.
Matthew plays baddie Michael Pearson who runs a huge, profitable marijuana empire in the UK and is looking to sell it off and settle down for a nice retired life on the money. Michael has his marijuana ‘farms’ spread over across various confidential locations that no competitor is aware of. He zeroes in on a potential buyer and demands his rightful pound of flesh for an empire that was built on a significant amount of blood on his hands.
However, one of his locations gets compromised and the buyer now tries to squeeze him tight by offering a much lower price. Henry Golding plays the role of a Chinese gangster who is part of a cocaine ring and expresses interest in buying Michael’s greens and begins to mess things up. It’s hard not to notice some racist tones when the Chinese mafia is talked about in the film.
Next, enter Hugh Grant, who plays ‘Fletcher’, a private investigator, who is trying to get money out of Michael’s aide in exchange of what he claims is a brilliant script that would explain why his plans to sell off his empire for a profit was getting fucked up.
The film is fast, funny, even gritty in parts. But one cannot help but feel that Guy Ritchie is trying really hard to make everything seem very ‘cool’ and ‘slick’. Despite a great cast, some of the acting is wooden, which I would like to believe is due to the fallacies in the script.
Some of the twists are pretty predictable, and if you are intuitive enough, you will be able to guess pretty early on in the movie who the real culprit is. I really enjoyed the small cameo of Colin Farrel, who plays a cool ‘coach’ training a bunch of kids to fight. His bits were fun.
The film also brilliantly mocks those who run British Tabloids and are always out to get it’s next salacious scandal on the Centre-spread. Woman don’t have much space in this all boys film, there is just Michael’s wife, who seems to be wearing the pants in the relationship, but barely gets any screen time.
‘The Gentlemen’ is a paradoxical and an obviously deliberate choice of title for a film that’s just about a bunch of bad boys running amok. It’s a fun film to watch, but all the style and the smart dialogues might begin to get on your nerves at some point.