Review of The Gentlemen series

Guy Ritchie’s feature-length The Gentlemen was so hooligan and sophisticated that it seemed like the spinoff series would surely fail, if only for the simple reason that it is possible to be a sophisticated hooligan for two hours, but it is almost impossible to maintain this pretentious state for eight episodes. Did the Netflix series The Gentlemen succeed?

Well, the show’s team, headed by Richie himself, managed not to fall into the tea and milk with beer. Or, on the contrary, they managed to fall, because Netflix’s The Gentlemen is a fictional world where gangsters and aristocrats, pillar dukes and gypsy smugglers sit at the same table, and they sip their Earl Grey with the same combination of snobbery and agility with which they bamboozle tincture on potatoes and apples of paradise with brake fluid.

The most obscure moment of the 2019 movie was the deal between a marijuana baron played by Matthew McConaughey and an old English nobleman, on whose land, right under the family castle, a clever American had set up a pot plantation. Thus, the manufacturer-trader received a convincing “roof,” and the representative of the impoverished naphthalene nobility received money to literally patch his roof, because rainwater was already dripping into the porcelain service and on the porcelain head.

It was this hazy moment that became the starting point for the television spinoff. And when Mickey Pearson finally sold his hemp empire, as he wanted, to retire in peace, and the old duke died, the youngest son (Theo James), a peacekeeping officer, returned to the family nest, first learning that he had inherited everything, and then realizing that his older brother was an aristocrat only when he was hunting, and a degenerate in general; and then he saw a surprise factory under the ground of his estate, run by the beautiful daughter of a major criminal mastermind (Kaya Scodelario)… The noble young duke, who learned in the army not to feel shock, took all the news with the same imperturbable face and resolved to help the growers to rapidly increase sales so that in a year the criminal factory would move from his land somewhere else.

When Guy Ritchie first tasted the serial format, he realized that a celebrity hack like Operation Fortune wouldn’t work on television, so he returned to his earlier self with even more authenticity than he did in the feature-length Gentlemen, which was a stale but delicious sip of the old cult Ritchie in between big-budget fantasies and over-the-shoulder action.

So, just like at the dawn of his career in Cards, Money, Two Guns and The Big Score, the singer of London and near-London (and near-London is all of Europe and a piece of America, and a good chunk of the globe) gangster streets, where Irish nomads meet Russian arms dealers, American jewelry (literally and figuratively) robbers, Belgian middlemen, drug dealers, bookmakers, illegal boxing promoters, petty thugs, ignorant rabble, outright thugs and even sadists Guy Ritchie bakes a multi-layered layer cake of diverse criminal circles and communities belonging to different hierarchical levels, different ethnicities, different profiles, different literal and figurative caliber, from the same kids in sweatpants to a Colombian drug lord with a machete, from a gang of Kosovar Albanians with a waving Tony Blair at their head to a meth king in a tuxedo (greetings from the TV series Breaking Bad in the same status as Giancarlo Esposito).

But in a gentlemanly way, and not quite, because the odious intelligentsia can also be “Chelyabinsk”, and lords can be neo-Nazis or clowns in a fancy dress of a hen, and the upper class with its “u English” is added to this motley crew, and an antique collectible gun is added to the caliber.

The protagonist of The Gentlemen, who, as a soldier, used to get his hands dirty with blood, does it again, that is, he gets dirty with Olympic calmness, guided by a seemingly noble goal: to get dirty, even to the very top, in order to finally cleanse his family and his home from underground evil (usually disgruntled ghosts live in the dungeons of ancient castles, but here, underground, the production of high is in full swing). But it seems that the new criminal world is not only within his capabilities, but also to his liking. However, Richie is not a moralist at all, so it doesn’t matter if the protagonist stays on the dark side. The only thing that matters is that he remains a gentleman.