The Gentlemen

Plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail.

Guy Ritche’s returns to direct another action movie, and I think he really knocks it out of the park. It should be prefaced that this action movie is dialogue heavy and the story moves at blistering pace, with strong English accents. As I sat comfortably at home watching this with my dad with subtitles and rewinding once during the movie, we both came out of the 1hr 50min movie mentally drained, and my dad was completely confused. Nonetheless, despite the movie’s twists and turns at top speed, it was an incredibly entertaining watch.

Hugh Grant becomes unrecognisable as an eccentric PI, Fletcher, who has a, in a very meta way, has a fondness for film. He talks about shooting in 2.35:1 Cinemascope / Anamorphic Format & he goes around trying to sell the story to Miramax, the actual distributor of this film. Other notable characters includes Matthew McConaughey’s Michael Pearson, Charlie Hunnam’s Ray, Michelle Dockery’s Rosalind Pearson, Colin Farrell’s Coach and Henry Golding’s Dry Eye. From end-to-end, being introduced to such interesting characters as the plot thickened was quite overwhelming but as the story’s pieces fell in place, everything clicked.

"There's only one rule in the jungle: when the lion's hungry, he eats!" - Mickey Pearson

I think what really made the film was having the story being told by the perspective of Fletcher as he had to use his imagination to fill gaps in the story / make his script more juicy. You don’t see this type of storytelling anywhere else and it really makes the audience ponder what is real in his story. Couple that with Colin Farrell’s Coach who stole every scene he was in, with the character doing criminal activity whilst hilariously protesting that he tries to make his “henchmen” good people. That ironic contrast in his character was really funny. Other notable moments include Ray brandishing a machine gun out of nowhere to clear a phone of evidence from a kid, a solid rap video by Coach’s boxers and an Emirates Stadium cameo.

All in all, while it was hard to follow the movie beat for beat, if one manages to do so, it is a truly enjoyable watch. Also might I add, the fact that this grossed only 120 million USD is quite disappointing but likely due to Covid-19. However, the budget is only 22 million USD which I found to be shockingly low for how it looked.

8.5/10