The British action director, Guy Ritchie, was once married to Madonna. Apparently, their liaison lasted for six or seven years before ending in divorce around 2008. Ritchie, who seems to exemplify "laddishness" (if that's a word), has a taste for superficial flash; this is not surprising in light of the director's relationship with the pop star -- his films are engineered like an Italian sports car, fast, sleek, and cruel, but without any intelligence beyond the capacity for generating torque and horse-power while clinging to the curves on twisty road. For the first 15 minutes, a movie like the crime picture The Gentlemen seems like the best entertainment in town, hyper-articulate, expensively staged, featuring an all-star cast involved in brutal shenanigans mostly played for raunchy comedy. After a half-hour, it all becomes a wee bit too much. And, at the two hour point, you are begging for the damn thing to come to an end. The precocious puerile humor, the nihilistic cynicism, and the lavishly (and pointlessly) complex narrative -- an unreliable voice-over, frequent cut-aways to illustrate points, cartoons educating the baffled viewer on various arcane points involving ethnicity and economics, and a general proclivity to not just penetrate but wholly demolish the fourth-wall -- all of these devices become exhausting; although the picture is supposed to be witty, knowing, and funny, the project is ultimately, more or less, humorless. Ritchie's career illustrates the baleful influence of Quentin Tarantino -- his movies contain all of the twists and turns and learned variations on genre themes that you find in Tarantino but without the American director's commitment to his twisted characters and occasional flashes of brilliance.
The Gentlemen ( 2019), a convoluted crime picture, sets out to be a cheeky, irreverent, and shocking entertainment. It succeeds until it doesn't. The movie features an all-star cast of impressive and charismatic male actors -- "laddishness"(if there is such a word) scarcely tolerates the presence of the female at all; the women's parts are lean to the point of vanishing. Hugh Grant plays Fletcher, a master manipulator, who, for reasons that I couldn't understand, plays all sides against the middle in the film's elaborate and violent plot -- Fletcher is very talkative and the frame for the film is his erratic and effusive narrative providing both backstory, a chronicle as to the various plot elements in the picture, and, finally, cynical and profane commentary on the story he is narrating. Mickey is played by Matthew McConnaughy, a cool as a cucumber marijuana farmer who has amassed a vast fortune by cultivating the weed in underground greenhouses and distributing it throughout Europe -- McConnaughy is great in his understated and deadly manner and, probably, the best thing in the movie. Matthew is a Jewish millionaire who wants to buy Mickey's enterprise "lock, stock, and (smoking) barrel" to quote another of Ritchie's films; Jeremy Strong, a opaque presence (mostly known for Succession) plays the Jewish businessman. Someone named Hunnam (apparently a well-known actor) plays Raymond, Mickey's hard-nosed and capable factotum. Finally, Colin Farrell acts the part of an Irish boxing coach called "Coach" in the film who manages a crew of rapper martial arts experts, all of them Black, who appear from time to time to wreak havoc on the other characters. There are Chinese and Cambodian gangsters and a mob of Russian thugs also thrown in for a good measure. The picture specializes in a mild form of outrage -- it's casually racist: ethnic identities are caricatured all in the name of good fun. For instance, at the film's end, Matthew, the Jewish businessman, is equated to Shylock and, impliedly, forced to hack out a pound of flesh from his body in retribution for some of the mischief that he has created. These racial and ethnic stereotypes are the equivalent of Tarantino's persistent use of the "N-word" in his movie, offenses that are justified by the picture's ostensible good humor -- indeed, it's "laddishness." The movie's plot is so intricate and hard to divine that I won't try to summarize what occurs in the film. The premise is that McConnaughey's blithe and nonchalant character wants to sell his dope empire. Matthew bids on the empire but, unbeknownst, of course, to Mickey tries to run-down the price on the enterprise by setting rival mobs against one another -- everyone competing, it seems, to raid and trash the marijuana enterprise to reduce its value. This leads to numerous killings, defenestrations, kidnappings, explosions, fires, and car-crashes. The Toddlers, Coaches thugs, get into spectacular fights with the Chinese gangsters and Mickey''s henchmen. After a dozen or so double-crosses, some Russian gangsters who have been lurking around the edges of the action get involved -- this is in the film's last five minutes. There's more bloodshed and, then, the movie ends happily. (I left out part of the plot involving a Rupert Murdoch style tabloid press mogul who is so hateful that everyone applauds when one or the other groups of the contending ethnic mobs force him to have carnal knowledge with a large and juicy-looking pig. This figure is played by the ugly and charismatic Eddie Marsan, one of Great Britain's best character actors,) There's lots of satire, interesting to British audiences but opaque to me, about the so-called "Toffs" -- that is, the depraved royals and aristocrats who infest upper-crust English society. Everyone speaks in elaborate, poetic jargon that seems cribbed from Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw -- these are very loquacious thugs who natter on in an intensely unnatural, stylized, and elaborate sort of discourse deploying the word "cunt" in every sentence.
It's too much and, ultimately, I was yearning for this perpetual motion machine of smart-ass speeches and gruesome murder to come to an end. The movie is ingenious but, ultimately, dispiriting. The movie was apparently popular and, in fact, spawned a several season TV show of the same name.
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