The Gentlemen. (18.)
Directed by Guy Ritchie.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell, Henry Golding, Jeremy Strong and Hugh Grant. 111 mins. Out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
The Gentlemen is a film that isn't as smart or as clever as it thinks it is, about a bunch of gangsters who aren't as smart or as clever as they think they are, written and directed by a man who could be smart and clever if only he didn't think he was.
After last year's Aladdin got him admission into the exclusive club of directors of films that had made over a billion dollars at the global box office, The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie's return to the kind of garrulous, London set, gangster comedy-drama he made his name with. It starts off at a tremendous pace with an almost creepily charismatic McConaughey as a drug baron who is trying to get out of the business and Hugh Grant as a pressed gutter of a newspaperman who is looking to blackmail him. Initially, this looks like it's going to be a whirl of a good time.
Ritchie though has the curse of the gab: he hooks you in then talks you out of the deal. Whenever things threaten to get going, some puffed-up little windbag will turn up and bend your ear with their yap yap yap yap and you just want to put your foot through the screen. If people in Guy Ritchie films spoke about half as much they'd be twice as entertaining.
The camel's back is when McConaughey's right-hand man Hunnan is sent off to a south London crack den to rescue a fallen heiress. He is reluctant but instead of just getting on with it he manages to drag it out for over five minutes delivering a lecture to the assembled junkies on the superiority of smoking weed. (This is crack den where they listen to 70s Roxy Music: not even Virginia Plain but In Every Dream House A Heartbreak. I dunno, I admire their taste but it doesn't sound like South London crack den soundtrack.) It's such a long dialogue scene that the viewer assumes that all this leading somewhere but in the end, it's all hot air.
Grant, McConaughey and Farrell are on cracking form but much of the rest of the cast don't cut the gib. Henry Golding is cast as a young Chinese upstart gangster who is trying to muscle in on the action but any underworld menace is totally destroyed by him looking and sounding like Jermaine Jenas.
And it's all front. The film is on a small scale but as overblown as any blockbuster. The numbers are too big, the talk is too long and the plot has so many reversals, so many Ta Da revelations that after a while it all goes for nothing.
The frustration is that as a writer Ritchie can hit upon a line of profane poetry and as a director his flashy little montages are often very effective pieces of big-screen storytelling. The big new innovation for this film is the use of the C-word, the Emmanuel Kant word. Every character uses it compulsively and Ritchie shows it off like it is a new Stafford Terrier he's bought, but doesn't quite know how to control properly. What Ritchie needs is someone to call him a Kant every time he overwrites, to slap him back into line when he overdoes it. He is a Kant, but a talented Kant and it's a pity to see him waste it.
Directed by Guy Ritchie.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell, Henry Golding, Jeremy Strong and Hugh Grant. 111 mins. Out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
The Gentlemen is a film that isn't as smart or as clever as it thinks it is, about a bunch of gangsters who aren't as smart or as clever as they think they are, written and directed by a man who could be smart and clever if only he didn't think he was.
After last year's Aladdin got him admission into the exclusive club of directors of films that had made over a billion dollars at the global box office, The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie's return to the kind of garrulous, London set, gangster comedy-drama he made his name with. It starts off at a tremendous pace with an almost creepily charismatic McConaughey as a drug baron who is trying to get out of the business and Hugh Grant as a pressed gutter of a newspaperman who is looking to blackmail him. Initially, this looks like it's going to be a whirl of a good time.
Ritchie though has the curse of the gab: he hooks you in then talks you out of the deal. Whenever things threaten to get going, some puffed-up little windbag will turn up and bend your ear with their yap yap yap yap and you just want to put your foot through the screen. If people in Guy Ritchie films spoke about half as much they'd be twice as entertaining.
The camel's back is when McConaughey's right-hand man Hunnan is sent off to a south London crack den to rescue a fallen heiress. He is reluctant but instead of just getting on with it he manages to drag it out for over five minutes delivering a lecture to the assembled junkies on the superiority of smoking weed. (This is crack den where they listen to 70s Roxy Music: not even Virginia Plain but In Every Dream House A Heartbreak. I dunno, I admire their taste but it doesn't sound like South London crack den soundtrack.) It's such a long dialogue scene that the viewer assumes that all this leading somewhere but in the end, it's all hot air.
Grant, McConaughey and Farrell are on cracking form but much of the rest of the cast don't cut the gib. Henry Golding is cast as a young Chinese upstart gangster who is trying to muscle in on the action but any underworld menace is totally destroyed by him looking and sounding like Jermaine Jenas.
And it's all front. The film is on a small scale but as overblown as any blockbuster. The numbers are too big, the talk is too long and the plot has so many reversals, so many Ta Da revelations that after a while it all goes for nothing.
The frustration is that as a writer Ritchie can hit upon a line of profane poetry and as a director his flashy little montages are often very effective pieces of big-screen storytelling. The big new innovation for this film is the use of the C-word, the Emmanuel Kant word. Every character uses it compulsively and Ritchie shows it off like it is a new Stafford Terrier he's bought, but doesn't quite know how to control properly. What Ritchie needs is someone to call him a Kant every time he overwrites, to slap him back into line when he overdoes it. He is a Kant, but a talented Kant and it's a pity to see him waste it.
