American Mickey Pearson arrived to the UK to study at Oxford, but decided to build his own marijuana plantation business instead, which grows in underground laboratories. He now wants to retire from the crime world and sell it, to live a peaceful life with his wife Rosalind, and he also made good connections with Lord Pressfield, who will help him with his goal. However, at a high society party, Pearson refused to shake hands with Daily Print tabloid owner Dave, who now wants revenge and hires detective Fletcher to spy on Pearson and Pressfield. Fletcher instead wants to sell his findings to Pearson's associate Raymond, and then to Dave, to earn double. Pearson wants to sell his business to Berger, but is shocked when some teenagers break into his marijuana laboratory and post YouTube rap videos of it, which alarms the police and reduces the value of other marijuana laboratories, which could be raided any time. Raymond discovers that the teenagers were given the location by thug Phuc, and that he in turn was hired by Berger to buy the business cheaper, for which he is punished by Pearson. Dave is kidnapped, drugged and filmmed while he was raped by a pig, and thus now has to avoid publishing anything about Perason or this video will be leaked online. Fletcher is also apprehended, while Pearson decides to return to his business.
The director and writer Guy Ritchie returned to his genre, the humorous crime film, with "The Gentlemen", which is typically fast, dynamic, extreme and unpredictable as his earlier films, yet a certain feeling of routine seems to have creeped in which makes the whole story feel as if we have already seen it even though we didn't. One of the more clever bits is the metafilm framing of the entire film: the majority is narrated by the cynical private detective Fletcher (excellent Hugh Grant) who spied on the antihero Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) and wrote his findings into a screenplay (!) which he now verbally "pitches" for an hour and a half in front of Pearson's associate Raymond, and in the finale even presents the ending of the film in front of a film studio executive. Fletcher's lines are the best in the film, giving it humor and wit, such as when he describes the meeting between Pearson and Berger: "Now starts the alpha dance. They're not really talking about clothes, Raymond. Oh, no. They're like a pair of old doggies sniffing round one another's intellectual assholes." There are enough surprises and twists to keep the movie interesting and engaging (for instance, when it is revealed that Raymond only told Fletcher to take off his shoes inside his home so that he could secretly hide a tracking device into said shoes and locate Fletcher later on), but it slips and falls several times due to some misguided or stupid ideas (Pearson infecting George, who vomits twice on the table; the compromising pig video) which reduce its quality. The second best performance was delivered by the underrated Eddie Marsan, who is deliciously vain and slimy as the villain Dave, a tabloid owner who writes the most ad hominem attacks as headlines ("Aristocratic, Bulimic, Junkie Autotuned Singing Daughter"). A bit of a rehash of Ritchie's previous film styles, but still energetic and strong enough to stand out.
Grade:++
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