On paper, “Matthew McConaughey as a weed kingpin in London” should be such an easy sell. McConaughey has enjoyed a variety of roles that trade on his easy-going charm in the last few years, you’d expect that concept to give him a lot of latitude to play both into and against expectations. The only expectation The Gentlemen goes against is how boring that central conceit could be. Guy Ritchie’s crime-comedy features an impressive cast all doing their best to push this underworld tale forward, but muddled storytelling choices and uninteresting characters make The Gentlemen a let-down.
Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) sits atop the marijuana production/distribution business in England, having risen the ranks thanks to his ability to charm the poorer Lords into letting him use their crumbling, unassuming estates as grow sites. But Mickey longs for a simpler life with his wife and business partner Rosalind (Michelle Dockery), so he’s looking to cash out. The shockwaves this sends through the weed underworld’s players, major and minor, drive the story, but that story is continuously muddled by unnecessary stylistic choices, chief among them the framing device, a protracted confrontation between Mickey’s consigliere, Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), and scummy tabloid photographer Fletcher (Hugh Grant). Fletcher’s narration frequently distracts, too often veering into silly meta callouts to filmmaking technique and fakeouts that take the air out of the proceedings.
These diversions range from pointless to downright disappointing, as one of the film’s early (and only) shocking developments is doubled back on once the narrative catches up to Fletcher’s narration. Worse, the story’s central mystery of who’s attacking Mickey’s empire as he exits the game will be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of the crime genre, so a lot of the tension The Gentlemen tries to build feels undercooked. Often, side plots involving Mickey’s henchmen and rivals take focus and to little end, furthering a feeling of aimlessness that permeates The Gentlemen. Colin Farrell’s Coach, in particular, feels completely shoehorned-in, the ringleader of a gang of small-timers whose only real utility is to remind the audience of how tough-but-fair Mickey is… as if every other character commenting on it regularly wasn’t enough.
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While everyone is clearly having fun playing off each other with Ritchie’s frenetic dialogue, the cast can’t quite elevate the script, with McConaughey being the most disappointing example. The Gentlemen goes out of its way to make Mickey honorable and boring, and little of the supporting cast’s exultations of his power and influence connect to the tea-sipping snooze pulling the strings. It’s rare to say a movie would’ve been more effective with less McConaughey, but maybe the mystique surrounding Mickey would’ve been a little more believable if we spent less time with him. After enough scenes of Mickey drolly doling out instructions to his underlings and opining about being king of the jungle, you just come to accept that if you want a good character to root for, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.
The only real moments of liveliness in The Gentlemen come from the interplay between Charlie Hunnam and Hugh Grant. Although their narration often leads The Gentlemen astray, when they’re on screen, Grant and Hunnam have an easy chemistry and provide most of The Gentlemen’s genuine laughs. Grant’s transition from playing charming leading men to less savory characters has been fun to watch and it’s hard to resist the temptation of believing his Hollywood-obsessed Fletcher could be a relative of Paddington 2’s wacky actor antagonist, Phoenix Buchanan. Michelle Dockery’s no-nonsense Rosalind has a lot more fire than her husband but is often relegated to a predictable “gangster’s wife” function in the story, including one tone-deaf scene where one of the film’s antagonists attacks her to get a reaction out of Mickey. It’s certainly not the only groan-inducing moment in a movie full of casually racist characters and low-hanging jokes. Yeah, a character named “Phuc Yu”… hilarious.
For as characteristically chatty as these Ritchie characters are, The Gentlemen really doesn’t have much to say. There are no character arcs and very little in the way of commentary on the place weed has in our culture today. The most frustrating part of the latter is that The Gentlemen’s demonstration of how the upper class benefits from the drug trade while the lower class fight for scraps seems like such fertile ground for social commentary. Instead, Mickey’s arrangement with his Lord friends is exclusively used to push the plot. Compounding this lack of any serious thematic drive is that The Gentlemen’s action beats are few and far between, and most of them only involve secondary characters, so there’s not a lot of investment in anything going on.
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One scene, in particular, sees a gang of robbers going up against Mickey’s goons quickly setting up two cameras so they can later edit the fight footage into a rap video to post on YouTube. When we watch the resulting video, we see at least 6-7 angles of shoddy, cheap fight footage intercut with their immaculately shot rapping in front of a car. Why even show the second camera getting set up?
Almost none of The Gentlemen’s stylistic choices are believably motivated, and it’s weird touches like these that constantly distract from the story. When the main players do get involved, it often leads to a contradiction of one of Mickey’s central tenets, which is to use words over violence whenever possible. Rarely is a problem in this movie solved without violence and that further calls into question just why we should root for Mickey, who can’t keep his own crew in line half the time and has little more to say about it than “well, do better next time, I guess.”
Source: IGN.com The Gentlemen Review