The Gentlemen Displays the Best Of Guy Ritchie's Style-Is-Substance Mentality

It’s been 25 years since Guy Ritchie, a young English filmmaker with a predilection for gangsters, violence, and profanity, made his directorial debut with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The chaotic crime comedy made him an instant star, and in the ensuing quarter century, he’s become a commercial success who critics can’t entirely make up their minds about. Some have always seen him as a wannabe Quentin Tarantino with more style than substance, but for us avid defenders, his giddy carnage and kinetic aesthetic has remained endlessly watchable. While there are lows, as those of us who sat through Swept Away can attest to, in the Ritchie oeuvre, there is a reason he’s endured. The only surprise is that it’s taken him this long to take advantage of the Peak TV era (even if it is starting to wane).

The Gentlemen is technically a spin-off of Ritchie’s 2019 movie of the same name, which starred Charlie Hunnam and Jeremy Strong, but the narrative connections are rather tangential. This Netflix show is its own thing, and in many ways, it’s far superior to the fun but deeply flawed film. Eddie Horniman (Theo James) is a soldier dragged away from his work when his father is on his deathbed. The family's vast fortune and estate are set to be inherited by his arrogant brother Freddie (Daniel Ings), but then the will reveals that the spare, rather than the heir, has been given everything instead.

Being a broke duke with a crumbling house in the 21st century has no real value for Eddie, but with the job comes an unexpected responsibility. The brothers discover that their father earned a large chunk of the family’s fortune through a marijuana empire run in the basement of their fancy home. The real baron of the operation is the Glass family, headed by incarcerated father Bobbie (Ray Winstone) and his savvy daughter Susie (Kaya Scodelario.) In need of cash fast, or Freddie will lose a certain appendage, Eddie falls head-first into a world of crime that proves more enthralling than anticipated.

There’s an important rule one must remember when watching a Guy Ritchie movie: He’s not taking things that seriously and neither should you. Ritchie has made dives into more somber territory (his recent war drama The Covenant was a surprisingly strong Paul Greengrass-esque display of tension), but his verve is most evident when there’s something to puncture the balloon of solemnity. There’s always an element of parody to Ritchie’s worlds. These are enhanced realities where everything is just that little bit grimier than you remember, and everyone is a breath away from a violent rage. Even his Sherlock Holmes films, which constitute some of his finest work, play around with this dichotomy (sometimes, the greatest detective in the world just needs to be kicked down a peg or two to keep him in his place.)

The Gentlemen delves into the upper classes of British landed gentry with the same eyeroll and irreverence Ritchie has for the gangsters of East End London. This is a place where Eddie’s late father has the middle name “Landrover” and the most scathing insults are shared over cups of tea in the good china. Having more money doesn’t make you any better than the lowlifes of Snatch and company, but it does imbue you with undeniable power in the way that only the class system can.

Freddie is a drug-snorting man-child who cannot drop his entitlement even in the face of death. Even Eddie, our ostensible hero who seems disdainful of the world he’s been born into, cannot help but be an arrogant jerk who barely acknowledges that his many servants are also people. In a scene-stealing speech from Giancarlo Esposito, playing one of the many criminals circling the estate, he talks of the English upper classes being the original gangsters. "The reason they own 75% of this country is because they stole it. William the Conqueror was worse than Al Capone," he says. "Taxation. Education. The judiciary. It’s all designed to help the aristocracy to hold on to their land and their money." It’s not especially subtle, but the battle of the classes that permeates The Gentlemen is part of the heightened alternate reality of Ritchie’s worlds.

The TV format has given Ritchie and company some room to breathe. The Gentlemen moves around the various interconnecting circles of the underworld, where some bosses are playing four-dimensional chess while their competition makes it up as they go along. The long-term implications of becoming an accidental crook show their weight on Eddie, whose life as a soldier has prepared him for certain aspects of criminal life but not all of them. Violence in Ritchie’s worlds tends to be silly and over-the-top, the stuff of comic books where you laugh then gasp, but here, living with the guilt of multiple murders is increasingly tough. Bullet wounds do not heal from one scene to the next.

Ritchie haters tend to view him as someone who prefers a good visual over a sturdy narrative. And make no mistake, The Gentlemen has style. The second episode has a manic chase through the woods that is part Evil Dead, part Road Runner cartoon, featuring a vaping man in a chicken suit with a shotgun. The story does fall somewhat victim to the cyclical nature of its setup — trouble comes knocking, Eddie and Susie must figure out what to do, blood and drugs go flying, then another bad guy turns up — but it’s all so endlessly diverting and funny that you can’t help but go alone. Like the best Ritchie films, there are backs to be stabbed, deals to be reneged, and guns to be fired. In these hyper-masculine worlds where a shotgun is an acceptable substitute for a brain (and a penis), how could the carnage not be over-the-top? The more wild things get, the more ridiculous the outcome.

Ritchie’s greatest failing has remained his seeming allergy to a strong female presence in his works. The original Gentlemen and the had some great women but they remained sidelined by the narrative and always felt more like missed opportunities than anything else. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is the only film he’s made with anything close to gender parity among its four leads, and it’s his best film in part because of how it lets its sparky heroine and villainess shine separately from the guys.

While The Gentlemen is still primarily a bloke-fest, it mercifully offers one of the most interesting arcs of the season to Susie. Scodelario’s steely glamor is gradually chipped away as her place at the top of the criminal pile threatens to crumble. She’s a born and bred criminal, the prodigal daughter of the man who believes he’s the one running the show from behind bars, and she has no time for nonsense. She orders deaths with the ease of someone asking for salt and vinegar on their fish and chips, then bemoans how having to commit so many murders is bad for business. In a series full of hapless men with nary a brain cell between them, Susie is usually the smartest person in the room at any given time. If only there were more scenes of her interacting with other women, particularly Joely Richardson, who plays the lady of the manor.

Ritchie skeptics are unlikely to be won over by The Gentlemen. You probably decided whether or not this director was for you by the time you saw RocknRolla. Fourteen films in, the Guy Ritchie industrial complex is a well-oiled machine (his next film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, starring Henry Cavill, will be released April 19). You’re on-board with the frenetic absurdity or you’re not. But if you do choose to give Guy a chance, remember that style is substance, macho culture is stupid, and you are allowed to laugh.

Kayleigh Donaldson is a writer of film and pop culture features for Screen Rant and Pajiba. Also seen at SyFy Fangrrls and Bright Wall Dark Room.