The Gentlemen movie is a ghastly low point in Guy Ritchie’s career, a compilation of exhaustingly hammy performances, throwback racism, and the realization that Matthew McConaughey just isn’t the right guy for Ritchie’s world of quick-talking and fast-firing London gangsters. (The Gentlemen fell smack-dab between Ritchie’s soulless Aladdin remake and tediously self-serious Wrath of Man; it was not a good stretch.) But The Gentlemen TV series is as frothy, enjoyable, and undemanding as its predecessor was a mess, and that’s because it’s not really a remake. The Gentlemen (TV version), is more like Ritchie paying homage to the era of his career when he was having fun rather than doing whatever films like The Gentlemen (movie version); Aladdin; and Wrath of Man are doing.
Ritchie has done the TV-spinoff thing before. Two years after Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels introduced audiences to his talky, violent, and brash writing and directing style, he adapted his film into the 2000 series Lock, Stock …. Nearly 20 years later, his sophomore film, Snatch, became a same-named streaming series that lasted two seasons on Crackle. (A pre-Servant Rupert Grint and a pre-Bridgerton Phoebe Dynevor were both in that one. A real time capsule!) The Gentlemen, which premieres on Netflix March 7, is similar to those series in that it’s not about its source material’s original characters, but rather the labyrinthine heists and capers in which so many of Ritchie’s bombastic creations find themselves.
That approach ends up working like gangbusters in an episodic format, with eight briskly paced installments that each take on a few of Ritchie’s specific quirks, interests, and preferences: boxing and gambling, Traveller communities and no-nonsense brunettes, speed-ramping and Vinnie Jones. The Gentlemen even pulls off making some of Ritchie’s most annoying predilections less so by … spending even more time with them over a full season and letting the ideas wear themselves out? It shouldn’t make sense! But Ritchie sets us firmly in this world with the first two episodes he directs and co-writes before handing the series off to Matthew Read, with whom he co-wrote the story, and veteran TV directors like Nima Nourizadeh and David Caffrey. The cast, led by the frenemy-flirtatious Theo James and Kaya Scodelario, is game. And hey, there’s only a little racism this time around. Let’s review how this surprisingly entertaining and pleasantly forgettable series puts a spin, or doesn’t, on Ritchie’s favorite tropes.
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The Trope: Everyone’s vulgar, deadpan, and speaks in British slang that might be made up.
As Seen In: Basically every other Ritchie project, excluding the family-friendly AladdinÂ
How does The Gentlemen do it?
The Gentlemen is about an aristocratic British family whose patriarch dies and leaves their centuries-old country estate, Halstead Manor, and accompanying duke title to his second son, Eddie Horniman (James), skipping over his eldest, addict and fuckup Freddy (Daniel Ings). The brothers’ oppositional relationship is a recurring Ritchie dynamic, as is their inability to go a single conversation without some amount of mellifluous vulgarity: First episode “Refined Aggression†has an elongated, immature gag in which everyone says “cock†as many times as possible. But once the series’s penis posturing is over, it settles into some running riffs that aren’t nearly as exasperating, like the rhyming staccato rhythm of Freddy and Eddie constantly saying each other’s names.
Some of the joy of watching a Ritchie joint is in hearing how these characters tease, neg, and criticize each other, and there’s a fair amount of that in Eddie’s relationship with Scodelario’s Susie Glass. Susie is, like Eddie, the smart child tasked with running their family’s business. While her father Bobby (Ray Winstone) is in prison, she’s leading the Glass crime family, who grows marijuana on aristocrats’ land and gives them a cut of the profits to maintain their crumbling estates. Susie negotiated a deal with Eddie’s father while he was alive to use Halstead Manor farmland, but Eddie wants to get the family out of the drug business, and that tension drives both the season’s long narrative arc and Eddie and Susie’s combative, coy, wordplay-based interplay. They banter about class difference, about the details of the violence they increasingly get into (how many severed fingers is too many?), and about whether they’re ever going to sleep together, arguments that work because of their chemistry. James and Ings are a similarly effective pairing; Freddy might be one of Ritchie’s most irritating characters, but his mania versus Eddie’s coolness makes for good friction. Every episode also includes a line of dialogue about what a “gentleman†does, to really excite that Leo-pointing-at-the-screen demographic.
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The Trope: The main characters include an odd-couple pair of one wary straight man and one impulsive fuckup …
As Seen In:Â Snatch;Â The Man From U.N.C.L.E.;Â Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
How does The Gentlemen do it?
Eddie is responsible, calculated, and deliberate. Freddy is impulsive, immature, and short-sighted. Can you believe that these at-odds personalities complicate the Hornimans’ attempts to extricate themselves from the Glass crime family? Literal and figurative brothers-in-arms willing to do anything to protect each other is a Ritchie thematic mainstay, but The Gentlemen does rely a little too much on the degree to which Freddy is a fuckup whose mistakes Eddie has to fix. The first half of the season sags under the predictability of Eddie’s “that’s what brothers do for each other†vow, which is tested as Freddy makes foolish business decisions and pisses off the wrong people. The series shifts into a more engaging gear when Freddy moves out from Eddie’s shadow and the brothers grapple with what the future of Halstead Manor should be; did you notice that “Freddy†sounds a lot like “Fredo� Hmm.
… and they’re usually in the orbit of a resourceful and no-nonsense brunette woman who isn’t going to take any man’s shit.
As Seen In: Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre; The Gentlemen (movie version); The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
How does The Gentlemen do it?
Capable brunettes are as essential to Ritchie’s filmography as they are to the Mission: Impossible films, and in The Gentlemen, Scodelario and her Louboutins step into many predecessors’ shoes: Rachel McAdams in Sherlock Holmes, Noomi Rapace in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Aubrey Plaza in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Michelle Dockery in The Gentlemen, Alicia Vikander in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. All these women are hard-edged, resourceful dynamos who won’t be limited by their male protagonists’ expectations and assumptions, and Scodelario’s Susie Glass is cut from the same designer cloth. (The costume design for her character, by Loulou Bontemps and Carly Griffith, is fantastic.) At first, Susie is sketched narrowly, since her primary responsibility is showing Eddie everything he doesn’t know about the drug business. But the series eventually gives her so much to do — butt heads with her father over strategy, problem-solve Eddie and Freddy’s errors, parry with Johnston when he quizzes her about antique watches, protect her brother Jack from his own ego — that she might have the most screen time of any Ritchie-created female character. And Scodelario gives Susie a steely core that works quite well against James’s more upright presentation of Eddie; she often steals scenes out from under him with coquettish-yet-smug line deliveries like, “I can be nice, and I can be not so nice. You’ve only seen me in one setting.†A request for season two: Can they kiss?
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The Trope: A lot of people get randomly and brutally killed …
As Seen In: Again, basically every other Ritchie project except AladdinÂ
How does The Gentlemen do it?
If you’re watching a Ritchie project, you’re definitely going to watch someone die, often by murder and sometimes by accident. The Gentlemen has a whole spectrum of fatal intentionality and a bunch of old-timey weapons lying around Halstead Manor and waiting to be used, so, no spoilers, but if you were curious what an antique shotgun could do to a modern drug dealer, you’re in luck! Also present: blood splatter on beautifully luxe clothes, secret killings that end up being meaningful later, some brutal fight scenes that evoke Gangs of London (director Nourizadeh helmed a couple episodes of that series), and a slow-motion dismembering by machete. It sounds like a lot, and the machete attack is quite egregious, but The Gentlemen spaces out the gore so the series’s comedic tone is always primary. And most of the time, the violence is in service of character development, so Ritchie can return to a question that has occupied him for a long time: Why does our culture train killers if we think killing is so bad? That leads us into our next trope-within-a-trope!
… often by characters with military and spy backgrounds.
As Seen In: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.; Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; The Covenant; Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
How does The Gentlemen do it?
Most of the criminals in a Ritchie project want to be criminals; they like the power, the quick cash, and the camaraderie that comes with breaking the law and getting away with it. When The Gentlemen introduces Eddie, he’s a member of a United Nations military convoy at the border between Turkey and Syria; as the second son who was never going to inherit Halstead Manor, Eddie left his family behind to find his own way. It’s easy for The Gentlemen to present Eddie as a good guy when he comes back home and tries to put the family on the straight and narrow by getting out from under the Glasses, but it’s more compelling storytelling that Eddie is, thanks to his military training, really quite good at being a criminal. The skills he learned to protect his country are pretty helpful when it comes to lining his own pockets, and James does well in contradictory modes — as the man who initially insists that he wants to help his family get legitimate, and eventually as the guy comfortably doling out violence to protect his allies and friends. Ritchie’s spy films like Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. are certainly more fun than his toll-of-war pictures The Covenant and Wrath of Man, but they all share an interest in the fluid borders between violence for societal reasons and personal ones. And James’s ability to believably hold a gun (remember the Divergent films and the Underworld spinoffs he was in?) does come in handy when The Gentlemen explores that boundary.
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The Trope: Those trained killers rub shoulders with London gangsters, bookies, fixers, and drug dealers …
As Seen In: The Gentlemen (movie version); Snatch; Revolver; RocknRolla; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
How does The Gentlemen do it?Â
You’d think from Ritchie’s world-building that London was exclusively populated by organized-crime families and their employees, and The Gentlemen only contributes to that sense. Sure, there are Hornimans not directly involved in the family’s weed-growing, but we don’t spend any significant time with them, and nearly every new character has some obvious (or hidden) criminal motive. Eddie can’t get the Glasses out of Halstead Manor because Susie helps him pay off a debt Freddy owed to a Scouse crime family trafficking in cocaine, Bible scripture, and track suits. If Eddie had his way, he’d sell the estate to Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito, playing a character who seems like an explicit nod to his time on Breaking Bad), whose gigantic mansion in the middle of downtown London suggests an impressive amount of power, but Stanley’s motives for wanting Eddie’s family home are mysterious.
Supporting characters include myriad bookies (nearly all untrustworthy, of course); a fixer played by Dar Salim, reuniting with Ritchie after The Covenant; the Glasses’s head grower Jimmy (Michael Vu), as earnest as he is constantly high; and a couple of brunettes in yet another crime gang who are great at upending men’s expectations (more on that trope later). Ritchie has often used drug dealing as a story engine, and the same goes here as The Gentlemen inches closer to widespread war over the course of the season. (One of the clearest links between The Gentlemen TV series and movie is their shared ideology on marijuana use as a source of joy rather than addiction, and other drugs — always dealt by minorities — as the problem. More on that later.)
… who gamble a lot, especially on boxing.
As Seen In: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Revolver, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of ShadowsÂ
How does The Gentlemen do it?Â
No one will ever be Brad Pitt in Snatch, but Harry Goodwins as Susie’s boxing brother Jack, all swagger and shirtlessness, sure does try. He hangs out at the Glassknuckle boxing ring, a business that seemingly serves as a front for the Glasses and further deepens their relationship with the Hornimans thanks to Freddy’s bad bets. “Nothing brings people together like a spot of blood on the canvas,†Susie says, and an early scene at Glassknuckle uses the contrast between the heightened atmosphere of a boxing match and the coolness of Susie identifying all the power-players ringside to show Eddie how this world works, with finesse as well as brute force. Sadly, James doesn’t get into the ring, so that’s something else to hope for in a potential season two.
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The Trope: A lot of explaining via flashbacks, onscreen text, and narration …
As Seen In: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch; Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword; The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
How does The Gentlemen do it?Â
Ritchie doesn’t always trust his audience to follow complicated subterfuge, including scenes in which his characters retroactively explain everything that we might not have noticed (or even seen) the first time around. The Gentlemen does this primarily through flashbacks, where we jump ahead after an action sequence and then revisit it when one of the characters involved talks about it to another character who wasn’t there, allowing the series to switch between first- and third-person perspectives. Less necessary, though, is the series’s overuse of onscreen text, often rendered in difficult-to-read yellow. As characters negotiate monetary amounts, equations appear on screen; as they discuss wines, the vintage names show up; when Eddie and Susie squabble about what to do with a foe, “Eddie’s alternative narrative†lists the steps of his plan and accompany a montage of hypothetical scenarios. It only works once, when during negotiations between Eddie and Susan and a Traveller family, the former’s whispering is labeled as “incomprehensible posh mumbling†and the latter’s as “incomprehensible traveler mumbling.†Otherwise, all that font is unnecessary flair.
… and a lot of customary Ritchie visual style, including speed ramping, slow-mo, and abrupt zooms.
As Seen In: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Snatch
How does The Gentlemen do it?Â
Remember the slow-motion dismemberment by machete mentioned earlier? That scene keeps us in the moment, experimenting with how we experience time to make it seem like the gore is going on forever. Ritchie loves to mess with linearity and camera movement (he has that in common with Zack Snyder, if nothing else), and little moments of that approach are all over The Gentlemen: the camera, focused on Eddie, begins to shake as he watches a boxing match, and then zooms in on his enemies in the crowd; Freddy does line after line of cocaine in slow motion as he gathers the courage to stand up for himself against an opposing gang. Also, nearly all these scenes are set to opera? Which is unexpected!
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The Trope: Ethnic, racial, and nationalist stereotyping
As Seen In: The Gentlemen (movie version); Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre; SnatchÂ
How does The Gentlemen do it?
Ritchie isn’t wrong that crime families are often organized by ethnic, racial, and national identities; tend to self-segregate; and survive by means of shared cultural heritage and a near-total rejection of outsiders. But Ritchie also has a tendency to portray these groups stereotypically, and sometimes offensively; think of how the Asian baddies in The Gentlemen movie are unfailingly honor-obsessed sexists who use rape as a weapon. The TV series uses that simplistic angle for its minority characters, too: The ones it portrays, like Kosovan-Albanians and Pakistanis, are uniformly cowardly and annoying, while the ones it only mentions, like Colombians and Russians, are bloodthirsty and threatening. Money launderer Chucky (Guz Khan) and his sycophant Ishy (Adam Kiani) trying to bully Eddie into eating a halal corn dog is an especially weird scene. (To bring up Gangs of London again, that series does a far better job depicting London’s feuding families with cultural nuance and specificity.)
The Gentlemen does at least put some care into its characterization of the Traveller community, following Ritchie’s trend of centering the Irish Travellers in Snatch and Rapace’s Romani fortune-teller character in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. The Ward family might be known for its “dynastic volatility,†Eddie learns, but they’re trustworthy and dependable — and distill a moonshine so gnarly that it even knocks Freddy back on his ass. Of all the people with whom Eddie and Susie are forced to do business to keep their product moving around Europe, the Travellers are the most convincingly conceived.
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The Trope: Hey, Vinnie Jones is here!
As Seen In: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch
How does The Gentlemen do it?
Ritchie movies love a certain kind of guy, and Vinnie Jones might very well be the archetype of that guy. Jason Statham is one of Ritchie’s most recurring collaborators, but former footballer Jones has a lived-in, earthy, and legitimately threatening quality — which is why it’s such a surprise to realize he hasn’t worked with Ritchie since appearing back-to-back in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and such a delight that Jones is playing totally against type in The Gentlemen. As Geoff, Halstead Manor’s groundskeeper, Jones is soft-spoken and loyal, protective of all weaker than himself and clear-eyed about the danger the Glass family has brought to his longtime home. His cabin is full of injured animals he’s brought home and nursed back to health, and he gets to be paternal with the Horniman siblings in a way we haven’t seen Jones be before. It did Bullet-Tooth Tony good to settle down! And there may a little bit of metatext in Jones — a conservative supporter of Queen Elizabeth II — showing up in The Gentlemen, which adds another potential trope to Ritchie’s arsenal …
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The (Possible) Trope: Pro-nobility leanings?
Seen in: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword; Sherlock Holmes; The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
How does The Gentlemen do it?
Maybe it’s far-fetched to suggest that Ritchie, whose early films were so much about the grimy strivers of London’s working class, is interested in celebrating royals and landed gentry in his more recent projects. But, consider the evidence! King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is about the importance of being led not just by a strong ruler, but the right ruler: The Britons can only thrive with the ordained monarch who is able to pull the sword from the stone, not some interloper imitator. In The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Hugh Grant plays an MI6 agent who unites a superteam devoted to defending world leaders, including British royalty. Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law’s Dr. John Watson (a veteran!) prevent a coup attempt on the monarchy and maintain the sanctity of the British Empire in Sherlock Holmes.
The Gentlemen keeps the low-key pro-nobility stance going with the suggestion that Eddie’s greatest self-discovery over the course of the season is that being a duke is actually an honorable, esteemed position — particularly if it’s used to protect other aristocrats from riff-raff who try to infringe on their land or steal their wealth. When Eddie defends the manor from outside coveters and maintains it for his family, those moments of triumph for the 13th Duke of Halstead feel like a suggestion that maybe aristocracy isn’t so bad if it has members this intelligent, brave, and resourceful. The Crown may be over, but The Gentlemen feels a bit like Ritchie picking up Peter Morgan’s mantle of defending those with inherited titles. If Ritchie gives the London family in his Ray Donovan spinoff royal connections, this theory’s got legs.