These "gentlemen" are anything but. Matthew McConaughey is an American drug lord in England who is looking to sell his marijuana empire and retire in luxury. Michelle Dockery is his wife who knows how to use a golden gun a little too well. Charlie Hunnam is his soft-spoken but violent right-hand man always several steps ahead of everyone else. Colin Farrell is a mild-mannered, Irish MMA coach who seems adept at criminal activities though he insists he's no gangster. And those are just the good guys.
I don't remember most of the character names (I'm not sure they matter much anyway here), but recounting the ensemble cast helps describe the narrative. McConaughey's prospective buyer is Jeremy Strong, an effete American Jewish billionaire with hands that are a little too clean. The other, more pushy, buyer is Henry Golding, a major player under a Chinese gangster who is all too eager to usurp the throne. When all the hands are in the pot, so to speak, things get messy, and though the action occurs less often than the laughs, it tends to explode unexpectedly and satisfyingly.
Not having seen many of Ritchie's earlier films, I'm aware enough to know this is a sort of return to form for the writer/director, a sort of "mockney" way of getting back to his roots. That is, he's digging deep into a specific time and place and people group to provide a performative -- almost camp -- romp through familiar tropes. You can tell he's having a lot of fun with the proceedings, and that this is what the guy loves best in his business. A bizarre ensemble cast that feed off each other's best impulses and worst manners, an unscrupulous screenplay riddled with wit, charm, and indecency, and of course a complex web of crime overlaid with stunning style. I mean, Charlie Hunnam has never looked better, and I suddenly desperately want Colin Farrell's array of matching plaid track suits.
As I've briefly (and poorly) described it, the story itself is clever if familiar. There is a secret connection between Golding and Strong to lower the price on McConaughey's empire, and once we find it out, we pretty much know what's going to happen. But what makes this film brilliant is the frame story, narrated brilliantly by Hugh Grant in his best performance in years. Grant plays a private detective employed by a slighted tabloid editor (Eddie Marsan) to dig up dirt on McConaughey and ends up writing a full script for a movie. It's called Bush, with a double entendre milked for all its worth, and Grant describes it to Hunnam during the movie as a framing device for the central story itself. His goal in narrating: to blackmail Hunnam and McConaughey into saving their own secrets. But, on a meta level, the inclusion of this device and character allows The Gentlemen to approach a level of consummate cinema as a film about film. It helps that current debates about the movie industry, drug industry, and the businesses of art and pot are all so hot right now.
All that said, it's still a Guy Ritchie movie, and that means certain elements will appeal more than others. Rape is threatened on the sole female character of substance, whose otherwise fascinating character is almost absent (she runs a garage with only female mechanics -- can we see more of that?!). Crude jokes about the names of people of Asian and African descent litter each scene, along with tired jabs at Jewish people (not to mention Strong's loudly, stereotypically "gay" delivery of his character). And while xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism are always serious concerns, you tend to expect them in a movie of this tenor and from this director, and tend to be just shy of offensive when the messages being communicated are, at best, ambiguous.
And, just to reiterate, this is Hugh Grant's best performance in years. I'm so excited that he has begun taking on challenging character roles. Here, he's essentially just a narrator -- one who is unreliable and gleefully slimy -- but I found his character uniquely absorbing. There's not a single moment when he isn't working through multiple emotional beats and delivering on all fronts. Watching him do it is a masterclass in acting.
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