Review of The Gentlemen (2020) by Hnestlyonthesly — 02 Mar 2020

The Gentlemen is done dirty by a January opening. It's an April, at least. The movie is more of an experiment in ASMR sexual harassment on the part of some attractive no good doers from Ritchie's past projects. The story is a bit of a mousetrap of chronologies and unreliable narration, which makes it fun and tightly packed, well-paced, and oddly both more and less self-aware than some of his previous projects.

I have a soft and blind spot for Guy Ritchie films. I don't usually know I'm watching one unless Charlie Hunnam is in it. I've passively consumed a lot of Ritchie's big budget films in my childhood and early adolescence. I am continually surprised by the ways that his aesthetic both parodies and plays along with some themes of toxic masculinity: the gestures toward gay- and race-baiting for humor, the way that self-aware British culture clashes with American sensibilities about masculinity, and the unexpected joy of a bro-y film that doesn't need to feel like a game of Cards Against Humanity with your edgelord friends from college. The Gentlemen is a who's who of Ritchie's oeuvre of caper and gangster flicks along with actors on the rise like Henry Golding and Michelle Dockery (of Downton fame), and Matthew McConnaughey saucily eye-fing the camera the entire movie. Spoilers ahead. Ritchie makes moves toward metatheatrical storytelling in his editing, his occasional illustrated captioning, an inset narrative, and the not-so-subtle parables wrapped in trailer material. The opening shot of this movie, in which McConnaughey dies, is startling, and the rewind and reconstruction of events, which has the room for embellishment and authorial focalization, are elements of novel direction, but there are other things that are less innovative, notably the rape threat, which amounts to maybe the biggest missed opportunity for a rewind. One cannot help but think of moments like these as unforced errors. It's not our job to explain away the sloppiness of these choices for "time" or "movie length," because when you're movie has a full on music video of fight porn, you lose the excuse of having trimmed the plot to its barest bones. It can't be fun to be the critic finger wagging at the twee racist jokes of a much beloved genre director of dark comedies. I expect that everyone's sensitivities will be tested at some point or another in this movie, but I'm personally a lot less guilty about laughing at the casually racist jokes in this movie than I am about the constant undercurrent of faux homosexual tension that's pervasive in this movie. If this is a directorial decision that's supposed to satirize the BDE of the genre heroes, I am open in being persuaded to like it. In terms of fun ways that Ritchie defuses my anxieties about racist accents and the rest: the movement of our sympathies from the first time we meet The Toddlers and their original entry versus the final scenes or the Three Strikes joke (I'm reading this in my notes, I don't know what these means anymore) shows how Ritchie can play on our expectations of what a Bro-y movie with a lot of Anglo strongmen would think about a bunch of black and brown tykes with GoPros strapped to their heads. Even the way that Colin Ferrell educates the kids in the shop is an excellent twist to his own character, because it feels like he's toying with some inner city hooligans, in part, to deflate their egos, but we then learn that this is sort of his whole deal. The way Ferrell responds to his Toddlers when they ask, "Is everything OK, Coach?" with "No, it's not fine" and admonishment for their past actions does a lovely job of injecting their relationship with the pathos of a mentor. I guess there's some insidious racism implicit in the idea that the only thing standing between these boys and crime is a rough tongued Irishman, but honestly the conversation on race that the Coach and his student have does enough to show that the film is at least aware of criticism. Laugh out loud moments in this movie were reserved for the dragon fable and it’s rewind--Wife and Friend were both tickled by it and Wife went in unaware of the trailer, so I think it was doubly funny for her. The rewinds on Dry Eye's introduction are a way of being able to build character for the narrator and create a sense that our story is unreliable. The way that the inset narrative eventually leads to the present moment of storytelling is an excellent control of plot. The foiling of blackmail and new relationships that are blended together post the journalist's initial run through of the story makes for a powerful second act. I like the twisty chronology of the beginning moment of the McConnaughey's murder and the way that Hugh Grant's twist with the Russian oligarch changes the trajectory of the story. Might have to think on this one a little harder, but I definitely recommend.