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HomeHollywood ReviewThe Gentlemen Series Review By BigMoviesCinema

The Gentlemen Series Review By BigMoviesCinema

The Gentlemen(3 / 5)

In the end, his spin-off series is an enormous success. A bit too long-winded for its own good in places and too glossy for its liking, especially in its deployment of tropes, but on the whole, its clown car of characters (attached to a wealthy aristocratic family/estate in transition) would hold your attention. Guy Ritchie’s penchant for eccentricity, the oddball and the outright darkly comic is on full display, and if the filmmaking is rarely less than spot-on, few filmmakers can make a joke quite as successfully. (Were it not for Lock, Stock and Snatch, one would be listening to me say Snatch, Lock, and Stock) The spin-off would have been a miniseries with half the running time and more careful distribution of attention to the comic or enigmatic characters, as the case may be. But the lingering production remainders of those early films (such as Mad Mel’s mercenary mayhem) is unavoidable.

Creator – Guy Ritchie

Cast – Theo James, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings, Giancarlo Esposito, Joely Richardson, Vinnie Jones

Streaming On – Netflix

The groundskeeper Geoff (Vinnie Jones), who seems to be an insignificant if ever-present extra, is the one person at Halstead Manor who never misses anything. His defining characteristic is his endless devotion to the Halsteads and, in that way, he is the silent repository of all the drama contained in the estate. The old duke of Halstead has just died and his will has (as Williams, the lawyer, says) ‘turned Halstead on its head’. Like all kinds of dynasties of English landed gentry in most kinds of terrible movies, the stewardship passes from father to elder son, as patriarchal as posh gets. The second son – Edward ‘Eddie’ Horniman (Theo James) – is a dapper uniform-wearer doing time abroad, and he’s come home before the old codger hits the deathtrap in question. The will decrees that he inherits the manor – and the title – rather than Fredrick ‘Freddy’ Horniman, ‘the rightful heir’ or the eldest son. Freddy is the antithesis of his brother: addicted and unhinged, which is pretty much the same as crackers. He tells Eddie – who after all the well-rehearsed dramatics regarding the will being dead wrong – that he owes about 4 million quid, which includes, pointedly, the ‘ridiculous interest’. The statuesque Helen is soon kissing Eddie for once being the man who says what she wants to hear. She introduces him – who is American, elevating his Americanness – to a woman who takes him down to the sprawling professionally manufactured barn, which is really a marijuana farm, its prosthetic c intend only to protect the lettuce from the bad weather growing happily under the tiny casual roof.

The obscene amounts of dope sprayed in gargantuan plastic tents make sense of the warehouse of wealth those acres must generate year by year. Given the significant amounts of pot money floating around his newly inherited estate, the suave, quick-tongued and statuesque-James’s Eddie, who isn’t flappable under pressure, is in trouble. His crackhead brother’s busted up situation, an eviction – the ones you don’t cover up – of an illegal business under his home, and the pushy prospective hoity-toity American buyer who has a perverse fascination with Halstead Manor – those are not open-and-shut cases. For any worth of goddamn, it seems that he’s inherited a dumpster full of madness.

Ritchie’s greatest strength lies in how well his characters are written. In such a vast sea, a few float to the surface. The first of these is Susie Glass, the boss of a very organised and money-making weed-crop crime syndicate. The inscrutable Miss Glass has a charming wickedness about her person. She will say that killing is bad for business, yet brushes off hacked-up bodies being placed at her feet, held in place by industrial-grade 3M tape. Her tongue is sharper than her scissors and her gaze is colder than arctic air. After Theo James made a valiant fight here and there, it is Kaya Scodelario who’ll steal the scene. You can never tell what you are going to get with Susie, and she’s never far from your mind. You never know what she’ll do next.

It is superb commitment to one’s craft. Another brilliant addition is John ‘The Gospel’ Dixon. This is the boss of a very religious mafia family, played devilishly by Pearce Quigley. He’s a slick-tongued elderly preacher-type gent. In true Ritchian fashion, he looks fondly on the scriptures and snuffs out the lives of those who have wronged him. When his dimwitted hothead brother, Tommy, goes missing from halstead, he makes a visit to the brothers. This exchange is one of the funniest on the show as The Gospel reads sharply from his manuscript in that high-pitched delivery, ‘urgently imploring’ the men to hold their hands in prayer (as Freddy squirms inside) while lowering himself into a deep squat, looking every bit like a prepubescent who has just squeezed out a mischievous fart.

There’s an apt shoutout to Giancarlo Esposito, every bit the gun-toting man, as the uber-rich Yank who wants to buy Halstead with the express motive of expanding his Entire methamphetamine operations on the estate’s acres and connections. Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) is meant to be the real puppetmaster but we do not see much of his scheming in real-time. In that motley, peculiar cast of characters, there’s Chucky, a black Pakistani-British money launderer who is Susie’s under-boss and whose latest great idea involves Mexican Corn dogs. In the role, Guz Khan is riotously funny.

But for all that, some of these characters, mentioned above, remain too much in the wings of the tale; the black comedy, in its patches, is kept in check by too much of the ‘posh’. The affect of aristocracy and money and privilege on the great unwashed who are thrust into contact with them, the cool talk/manner these first-class carriers of such baggage is accustomed to speak in, all that’s fine in dribs and drabs but too much of it gives you ennui, these takes on the British gentry, and fast. Films by writers with an ear for dialogue are of too few since the great Jimmy McGovern left off since the late 1980s. I wish there had been more work for either or both of the following actors, Vinnie Jones and Joely Richardson as, respectively, Lady Sabrina Horniman (bringing some welcome touch and class to proceedings). She shoots not only a mean game of snooker as well as lining pockets with ease; both these under-employed actors are much glummed-up here.

When cabbage does get slung, the shoot better be from the bow of a cannon, not a peashooter. A few, quite touching moments seem lost when one is giving attention to shenanigans, but I enjoyed them all just the same, for example, the relationship that unravels between Lady Horniman (thankfully, here she is not Webster’s simpering wife), and Geoff, this former bruiser (played by Johnny Harris) and Susie’s, in the rare moments you’ll spot it, dropping of her working-class guard referring to her boxing-mishap of a brother; not to forget Eddie’s, unwavering allegiance to his older, reprobate brother (and brother-in-law in addition), too.

All roads lead to Halstead Manor, the eye of the storm Here’s a film about a lot of stuff, and The Gentlemen casts a lot of people on people whom Eddie (played, hilariously, by Charlie Hunnam) would rather not be getting acquainted. On top of the aforementioned criminal aristocrat, there are high-rollers galore, from high-flying London gang bosses, to flashy wheeler-dealer types, to dumb-ass street thugs. Interwoven into this mix are blackmail, bros who do a ‘chicken dance’ for porn, creepy money guys, a promising young boxer, criminally powerful fight promoters, high-end auto thieves, and gypsy travellers always eager to initiate a free fist fight. It’s a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s a bit too long. It’s a bit too convoluted. But, for the most part, it’s a workmanlike affair.

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