Movie Review: 'The Gentlemen' is One of My Favorites of 2020

The Gentlemen is one of those movies that sneaks up on you with how clever it is. This lighthearted yet unabashedly violent and filthy-mouthed flick from Guy Ritchie is light on its feet, supremely charming, and still comes off like classic tough guy cinema. It’s everything people like me have wanted from Director Guy Ritchie since he sold his soul to corporate Hollywood to make boring blockbusters.

The Gentlemen stars Matthew McConaughey as Mickey. Mickey is the alpha drug dealer of England. Mickey has figured out an insanely clever scheme to grow and cultivate high end marijuana where so many others in England have failed. The country makes growing weed very difficult for a number of reasons but because Mickey is rich, clever and charming, he’s built an empire that he’s ready to leave behind.

Mickey is looking to sell his lucrative operation to a fellow American ‘investor,’ Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong), for $400 million dollars. However, to do that he may have to start killing people again. A young upstart by the nickname of Dry Eye (Henry Golding) has targeted Mickey’s operation and wants to buy it himself. His only problem is, he’s not the head of his modest crime family and he doesn’t have anywhere near $400 million dollars.

All of this information is relayed in shrewd fashion by Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a morally flexible private investigator currently in the employ of an ambitious news editor, named Big Dave (Eddie Marsan) who wants to take Mickey down. I say that Fletcher is currently employed by Big Dave because through the telling of the story, Fletcher is intending to sell his information to Mickey via Mickey’s consigliere, Raymond (Charlie Hunnam).

Fletcher weaves the tale well but he’s not aware of all of the details, such as those involving Mickey’s beloved and devoted gangster wife, Rosalind (Michele Dockery), or the almost accidental involvement of Coach (Colin Ferrell), a supreme tough guy who lives by an unbreakable code of honor that ties him incidentally to Mickey and Raymond via the actions of his students, a group of Parkour and MMA obsessed rappers known as ‘The Toddlers.’

If that’s not enough color for you, trust me, The Gentlemen still has more color to spare. The Gentlemen is bloody and liberally sprinkled with the use of the ‘C-word’ but it’s also genuinely hysterical at times, especially when Hugh Grant is riffing opposite Hunnam’s stone cold killer. The chemistry of Hunnam and Grant and the comic tension that they cultivate is the engine that powers The Gentlemen.

Matthew McConaughey oozes cool throughout The Gentlemen and the scenes that bookend The Gentlemen are wonderful examples of his cool under fire persona. If you love characters who are consistently one step ahead of the con, always three chess moves into the future, The Gentlemen is undoubtedly the movie for you. McConaughey is that character, the wildly clever, always under control, smart yet tough guy with a heart of gold. In lesser hands, the character would be merely flashy or arrogant, but McConaughey strikes the perfect balance between arrogance and cool.

Guy Ritchie hasn’t directed anything this fun in years. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy aspects of his blockbuster years, including fun stretches of the often bloated Sherlock Holmes movies or the less dreary and soulless moments of his Aladdin, but movies like The Gentlemen and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels are clearly where Ritchie is most at home and enjoying himself. That joy radiates from the screen in the delight he takes in the antics of Ferrell and Grant and the cool he facilitates through McConaughey and Hunnam.

The Gentlemen is one of my low key favorite movies of 2020.Witty, dark, violent and funny, The Gentlemen is not a cinematic triumph or an awards contender but it’s more entertaining than most of the movies we’re likely to see this year.