The Gentlemen (2020)

After being a director for hire for a few years Guy Richie returns to his bread and butter with The Gentlemen, as typical a Richie film as there can be. It's smarmy clever dialogue, riddled with racism/sexism/homophobia, slickly filmed violence, and twisty gangster plot, is punctuated with a lot of heavy accents. If you dig Richie's style this will do it for you. If he's not your thing this isn't likely to win you over.

If you let yourself, watching the scenery chewing performances of this cast, especially Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant, and Mathew McConaughey, can be a lot of fun, even if a lot of their dialogue is cringey in its oh so cool UK thug banter. If Richie did any real analysis of the depravity of these sorts of characters and didn't fetishize them for entertainment value perhaps it could make for something fascinating. But that's not his thing. This, like his breakout Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, plays so that we are to buy into the coolness of this hyper-masculinity.

I did like the way Richie framed his story as a "story within a story," the whole thing presented as being told by Grant's to Hunnam's character. The story is fun enough if you can get through the eye-rolly parts. It isn't too long and there is enough story to fill the time. So while die hard fans might eat it up, the rest of us might find it a mildly entertaining distraction if we can overlook a lot of the grating parts.

The Gentlemen
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Hugh Grant, Colin Farrell, Henry Golding, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Jason Wong
Writer/Director: Guy Richie