Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t watch a pair of episodes in which a woman hacks a man to death with a machete and a machine-gun battle over the future of Hitler’s testicle gets decided with a vintage hand grenade and say the television show in question is taking its foot off the gas a bit. After all, either event would be the most exciting thing that ever happened in, I don’t know, This Is Us. But this is The Gentlemen we’re talking about here, and in its first two episodes, writer-director Guy Ritchie set the mayhem bar pretty high.
But if the show’s third and fourth outings don’t clear that bar, they glide pretty confidently right underneath it. The main issue is simply a structural one. The first two episodes were one long daisy chain of escalating close calls, narrow escapes, and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat (only to be dropped immediately into a new, larger pair of jaws), connected by the Freddy shotgun-murder cliffhanger. These are the kinds of tricks Breaking Bad and even Ozark used to keep things cooking.
By comparison, “Where’s My Weed At?†and “An Unsympathetic Gentlemen†are more episodic in nature. Sure, our heroes’ adventures in both are connected by their deepening, evolving business relationship, as well as by an unknown player using a good old-fashioned honeytrap to get the dirt on their operation. But the two capers are otherwise self-contained, almost villain-of-the-week affairs.
Episode three, “Where’s My Weed At?†is Jimmy’s fault, pretty much. The lovable weedhead gets himself socially engineered by Gabrielle (Ruby Sear), an operative working for a fedora’d mystery man. While she strikes up a meet-cute with Jimmy, she also swipes his keys and hands them off to an associate who steals his van and the enormous weed shipment inside it. The shipment winds up getting torched, “some men just want to watch the world burn†style.
The missing weed understandably pisses off its intended recipient, an Albanian gangster named Tonibler (Cameron Cook) — that’s “Tony Blair,†in honor of the prime minister. While Susie and her men hunt for the weed, she gives Eddie the job of taking care of Tony Blair’s make-good: stealing an ultra-rare green Lamborghini Hurricane from a grey-market high-end auto-dealer named Mercy (Martha Millan).
Rather foolishly (in my opinion), he involves Freddy in every stage of the operation, from having him and his considerably more capable wife Tammy (Chanel Cresswell) pose as preposterous Russian oligarchs to using him as the wheelman the night of the theft. The former goes alright; the latter ends up with Freddy tied to a chair with a machete pointed at him. This time, Tony Blair himself is the make-good: They exchange the Albanian’s life for Freddy’s, and Mercy makes them watch as she hacks the guy to death. (The show repeatedly drives home that regardless of their personal stance on or interest in violence, everyone in this world has to protect their reputations violently, or else every swinging dick will take a shot at them.)
Episode four, “An Unsympathetic Gentlemen,†goes back to the Breaking Bad well in a different fashion: Its big bad winds up being a Nazi. That would be Max (Freddie Fox), another cash-poor aristocratic heir who inherits a sprawling, pricey estate when his dad has a heart attack after chasing tourists away with a machine gun in the nude while ranting about lizards. (Pro tip: When old British men rant about lizard people, you can pretty well guess how they feel about certain other, less imaginary groups of people.)
Max comes into the equation when, to make up for Jimmy’s shortfall and further their agreement to raise revenue, Susie tells Eddie she wants to open a new weed farm on his family estate. When he finds out about Max’s situation, Eddie suggests his place instead — with the caveat that Max’s dad was being blackmailed over some untoward artifact, the son wants the evidence back, and the blackmailer paid off in exchange for leasing the land.
The blackmailer is an ex-journalist named Frank (John Thomson), who was one of the top reporters in the country “until the oligarchs took over,†as his daughter helpfully informs everyone. Now, instead of breaking stories, he uses what he digs up to extort money from those same oligarchs. Eddie scoffs at his supposed integrity, although I’m not sure anyone as conversant with killing people as Eddie has a leg to stand on. And he needs the money to placate a hulking restauranteur named Sandy (Hon Ping Tang), who is both some kind of loan shark and, apparently, an excellent chef.
Eddie’s mistake this time around is agreeing to Max’s request not to look inside the blackmail file before returning it. It turns out it’s Max, not his dad, who was the target of Frank’s scheme. Max is a huge admirer of the art, and the testicle, of Adolf Hitler, both of which he has collected. Of course, admitting all this to gangsters makes him an even better blackmail target, and now Susie will be able to get a better deal out of him — after they kill his mom in a battle using old World War II armaments. This finally earns Eddie the respect of Jack (Harry Goodwins), Susie’s boxer brother and consigliere.
In the end, though, it’s Lady Sabrina who really saves the day. With the help of groundskeeper Jeff, she sets the organization up with a new home in the form of a neighboring sheep farm, whose owner is broke, amenable to extralegal income, and easily charmed by beautiful aristocrats. (Considering how gorgeously Joely Richardson and Kaya Scodelario are styled on this show, I’m semi-surprised they can’t charm bullets back into their guns after being fired at them.) But it all may be for naught because here comes our man Jimmy, bringing Gabrielle right into the underground farm and divulging the details about the entire national network of similar facilities. Hey, I get chatty when I’m stoned, too.
Susie makes a perceptive comment about an emerging theme of the show at some point during this stretch: Eddie is valuable to them given the nature of their operation because he is able to move effortlessly among the upper crust, yet can also kill and watch people get killed right in front of him without losing sleep over it. The implication is that both his life in the aristocracy and his life in the military prepared him for life as a gangster. This is not a compliment for either institution.
Nazi fanboys get a well-deserved drubbing here too. Not just in the sense that (Trump supporters don’t read this) it’s always fun to watch Nazis get killed, but in the sense that they’re ridiculous, laughable imbeciles. Max’s overheated praise of Hitler’s merely adequate art has decades of tradition to back it up, as does his almost sexual rhapsodizing about the more severe and still-influential design aesthetic of the Third Reich. (Ask House Harkonnen if you don’t believe me on that.)
While his ecstasy over Hitler’s severed testicle appears to be of a piece with the swipes at fash kitsch, though, it’s a misplaced and misjudged plot point. It’s funny, I guess, if you’re a seventh grader, to trace the horrors of World War II to Hitler getting one of his balls blown or bitten off, depending on the story you believe. It’s also, in addition to being false, a smokescreen. Hate is something any human being can come by naturally; no involuntary orchiectomy is required.
But whatever, in the end this is a black comedy about British gangsters and their counterparts with peerages. It’s a show where a lady with a machete can politely say “Thank you for your attention†while her face drips with blood like a slasher villain, or a Lady Sabrina can happily inform her son she found a place for his “marriage-juana plantation.†It is the definition of it ain’t that deep. I just hope it can keep up its breakneck speed across the surface.